By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
It had been 1,104 days — ESPN did the counting — since UMass last tasted a road win of any real weight, and longer still since the Minutemen had won anything at all. Sixteen straight losses will grind the hope out of any program. So when quarterback Pop Watson III threw for 197 yards and three touchdowns in a 37-21 win over Rutgers on Thursday night, it wasn't just a season-opening victory. It was a program exhaling.
Both teams were opening their seasons, which makes the final score more than a little lopsided in context — Rutgers, a Big Ten program, was expected to handle a UMass team that hadn't won since ESPN's own count of days-since-victory reads like a prison calendar. Instead, UMass dominated on the road, in New Jersey, in a game that had every reason to go the other way.
The skid is the kind of thing that reshapes how a locker room thinks about itself. Losing streaks like that don't just cost games — they cost belief. Thursday night in Piscataway, belief got some of itself back.
This corner of the sports page has a soft spot for teams that have forgotten how good winning feels, and UMass just relearned it in the loudest possible way. There's a long season ahead, and one win over Rutgers won't rewrite three years of history by itself. But every turnaround has to start somewhere, and this is as good a somewhere as any.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN.
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