Rutgers just lost a "buy" game to a team that went 0-12 last season. The UMASS Minutemen have never beaten an FBS team since becoming an FBS themselves. That changed with a big upset of Rutgers, and Greg Schiano has egg on his face; Rutgers is now the laughingstock of the Big Ten and the college football world.
For Wisconsin, there's some buried good news. Really, there are a couple of pieces of good news for the Badgers. The most obvious is that Wisconsin has Rutgers on the schedule. The Badgers face the Scarlet Knights on November 7 at Camp Randall. That was originally considered a swing game on both teams' schedules. There's no way that can be true anymore. Rutgers paid over $1.5 million to get beat by UMASS. Ugly.
ESPN Analytics updated its prediction of the game immediately after the Rutgers loss, even though Wisconsin was already the favorite (playing at home). It jumped from a slight favorite to a 72% likelihood for the Badgers to win. Who knows how much that will change by the time the two teams meet. Rutgers has six games between now and then. If they can't beat UMASS, can they beat any team on their schedule?
Wisconsin has two pieces of good news with Rutgers being embarrassed by UMASS
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So that's the first piece of good news: the Badgers went from having a swing game with Rutgers to being the clear favorite, and the game now looks like a win. Sure, they still have to play the game, and taking an opponent for granted could be what got Rutgers into this mess with UMASS, but that game is looking way different now.
The second piece of good news is that Luke Fickell is no longer the Big Ten coach in the hot seat. It's now the hottest seat. Greg Schiano is now firmly in the spotlight of being fired. Rutgers fans are already googling "Greg Schiano buyout." Which, the bar is low at Rutgers, and yet this was clearly embarrassing.
Luke Fickell won't be judged the first week, and hopefully not the next couple of weeks when Wisconsin plays their "buy" games against Western Illinois and Eastern Michigan. The judgment may not come until Penn State and Michigan State. Yet now the attention turns to Schiano.
Read also: Wisconsin vs No. 4 Notre Dame Week 1: How to watch, weather, injuries, odds, and more
There's a lot of time between now and November, but if you were scouting Rutgers as either a diehard Wisconsin fan or a casual sports fan watching college football, you saw that the Scarlet Knights do not look like a team that can win football games. That's good news for Wisconsin.
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