By Jordan Hansen
Part 13 of The Daily Iowan’s summer football previews
It’s actually rather impressive the Rutgers football team managed to win four games last season.
Wait, you might be thinking, isn’t a 4-8 record bad?
Yes (and the 1-7 conference record is even worse), but with the giant scandalous mess the team became, it almost should celebrated.
Issues with the team started before the season even started. A redshirt freshman defensive back was arrested on felony robbery charges. Five other players were suspended for half of the season-opener because of curfew violations.
Things only got worse from there. Head coach Kyle Flood (who was fired after the season) was embroiled in an academic scandal stemming from alleged contact with a professor regarding a football player’s grades.
It ended up costing Flood a three-game suspension from the university in the middle of the season.
However, the issues didn’t stop there, and in fact, it got worse. Six current Rutgers football players were arrested on felony assault and armed robbery charges, among others.
Last, wide receiver Leonte Carroo was arrested on domestic-assault charges (which were later dropped) and suspended two games for that incident.
Somehow, with all those distractions, Rutgers still managed to beat Indiana.
Enter new head coach Chris Ash.
The former Ohio State co-defensive coordinator is an Iowa native and played college football at Drake. He then went to graduate school at Iowa State, where he spent several years as the Cyclone’s defensive-back coach.
Ash’s wandering coaching journey also took him to Wisconsin and Arkansas, where he coached under Brett Bielema. His last two years before taking the Rutgers job were under Urban Meyer, completing a very impressive coaching tree.
Now, Rutgers has to figure out what type of team it is going to be. Playing in the East Division is rough, because Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Penn State all reside in the same half of the conference.
Ash has a defensive and Big Ten pedigree, which should bode well for the future of the program. However, he has a whole bunch of work to do.
The Scarlet Knights were 12th in the conference in both rushing and passing defense, a pressing matter for Ash to fix. The team brings back seven defensive starters from last year — which should help — but there is still a tremendous amount of work to do.
Offensively, Rutgers was marginally better. Its offensive rushing attack — led by sophomores Robert Martin and Josh Hicks — ranked seventh in the conference, totaling 2,039 yards and 17 touchdowns.
Both backs will return this season and should be huge parts of Scarlet Knight offense. A good number of offensive linemen are set to return this year, which should help the running backs as well as quarterback Chris Laviano.
Laviano threw for 2,247 yards last season, scoring 16 touchdowns while also throwing 12 interceptions. Like the running-back duo, Laviano was also a sophomore last season and another off-season of preparation should help.
All told, this season will more than likely go very poorly for Rutgers. That’s to be expected, and anything short of a complete player collapse will be deemed a success.
It’s going to take time to rebuild the program, which isn’t exactly what the Big Ten thought it was getting when Rutgers joined the conference.
