The first college football game was played in 1869, and the Rutgers Queensmen won by the first scorigami ever.
Bowls have existed for more than a century, and Rutgers has played in 10 of them, including the 1978 Garden State Bowl.
The Rutgers football team never approached a bowl game with anything like their own history. Rutgers has been to the Pinstripe Bowl twice, as well as the Insight Bowl, Texas Bowl, International Bowl, PapaJohns.com Bowl, St.
For most of the last century, only New Jersey was spared from an apocalyptic event that would have made Rutgers ineligible for a top bowl game. There is a tier of bowls between the College Football Playoff/New Year's Six group of bowls and the mid-December weekday afternoon filler bowls that represent Rutgers' usual ceiling. The Sun, the Citrus, the Liberty, and the Gator Bowl have been around for a long time, but have always been the second tier of bowls.
Rutgers will rise to its greatest-ever postseason height in the Gator Bowl, because we are in the midst of a global epidemic, and it happened 43 years ago.
It stinks for Texas A&M, and when the game happens, it will probably stink for Rutgers, because Wake Forest is really good, and the Scarlet Knights will have a week of preparation after having thought their season was over. It is also great for Rutgers.
The Rutgers team believed that their bowl streak was still going strong, even though Rice had not been to a bowl in over a year. Rutgers has been out of the bowl picture for more than any other Power 5 school. Louisiana-Monroe is the only school in the Bowl Championship Series that has not played in a bowl in more than two years.
But now? Rutgers has been to a bowl game recently more than any other team in the sport, including Texas, USC, and Nebraska. That achievement is even more remarkable since the team did not have a 100 yard runner in any of the last eight games and did not have a 100 yard passer in any of the last four. Rutgers went 2-7 in Big Ten play after beating Temple, Syracuse, and Delaware to start the season.
Wake Forest has three running backs with at least five touchdown runs and Sam Hartman who needs 76 passing yards to reach 4,000 for the season.
Nebraska, which went 1-8 in the conference but had a scoring differential of zero, would be a better choice to play Wake Forest than it would be. Nebraska would probably have the good sense to avoid a bowl game.
Rutgers' bowl trip is earned. The Scarlet Knights were given the right of first refusal to the Gator Bowl because of their good Academic Progress Rate score. They now get New Year's Eve in Florida, and an eternal bragging right over Princeton, which lost the first football game, and which has never earned such prestige as the Gator Bowl in recognition of their academics.
