Rutgers had the saddest crowd blackout ever

Hello, Rutgers is playing Illinois at home on Saturday at Noon. This team is 1-4, but all week, Rutgers urged Scarlet Knight fans to show up to the game wearing black.

Rutgers fans probably showed up en masse, right? Wrong. So very wrong — take a look at the “blackout” turnout.

To be fair, Rutgers football is incredibly bad this year, even by Rutgers’ standards:

The bulk of the worst modern-era Rutgers squads were in the 1950s and 1960s, but there are some recent examples too.

In 2002, Rutgers went 1-11 and finished 104th out of 117th in S&P+. That was Greg Schiano’s second season at the helm. His first one didn’t go much better. Rutgers went 2-10 the year before.

The 1997 Rutgers squad went 0-11 and finished with a Simple Ratings Score of -22.06, the worst in Rutgers history, according to Sports-Reference. They gave up over 45 points a game. That squad finished 109th out of 112 teams in S&P+, per Bill Connelly’s calculations.

So there probably have been a few Rutgers squads worse than this year’s edition, but not too many — and none of those old teams had the benefit of Big Ten membership.

And the 2018 Scarlet Knights, at least so far, don’t look that far off the horrible late-’90s squads.

Not to mention Rutgers still has to face Wisconsin, Maryland, Northwestern, Michigan, Michigan State, and Penn State this season. Yeah, this is gonna get ugly.

Sure, this Rutgers team is bad, so this sad turnout is understandable. It’s been a long time since the school was known for its home field advantage — take a look at some shots from Rutgers’ 78-0 loss to Michigan in 2016:

And during a blowout loss to Penn State that same year:

Stay strong, Rutgers fans.