Scarlet Knights

Rutgers goes into its Big Ten season carrying the weight of being the conference's newest member since 2014, still chasing the kind of finish that would put the Scarlet Knights among the league's regulars rather than its underdogs. Greg Schiano is back on the sideline for that climb, the same coach who built the program's best modern stretch in the 2000s and returned in 2020 to try to do it again; he remains the winningest coach the school has had.

The program's roots go back further than almost anything else in the sport. On November 6, 1869, Rutgers met Princeton on College Avenue in New Brunswick in what is recognised as the first intercollegiate football game ever played, and the result left both schools sharing a national title for that year. Two more championship seasons followed, in 1961 and in an undefeated 1976 campaign in which the team, playing as an independent, turned down a bowl invitation. Scarlet, adopted as the school colour by the Board of Trustees in 1900, gave the team its name and its mascot, Sir Henry, The Scarlet Knight.

Home games are played at SHI Stadium in Piscataway, expanded to just over 52,000 seats in 2009, a long way from the College Field grounds where the program started or Neilson Field, where it stayed for close to five decades. Among those who have come through the program, Aaron Donald's route from Pittsburgh to three NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards stands out, and Eric LeGrand's story carries its own weight after the spinal cord injury he suffered on the field in 2010, the kind of thing a locker room does not forget.

These days the rivalry that matters is with Penn State, played every year since Rutgers joined the Big Ten, even without a trophy attached to it. The older one, against Princeton, ran out in 1980 and traced back to that same afternoon on College Avenue where it all began.