UMass walked into 2026 carrying the nation’s longest active losing streak, and by Thursday night it was gone.
The Minutemen went on the road as heavy underdogs and stunned Rutgers 37-21, collecting their first victory since October 2024 and putting an end to a 16-game slide. It was an early-season jolt for a program that has spent most of the past decade and a half scraping for anything close to sustained success, but for one night UMass had the kind of result that sticks.
That win also changed the national picture. With UMass finally in the win column, Oklahoma State now has the longest active FBS losing streak at 11 straight games.
The Cowboys won their first game in 2025, then dropped each of their final 11, including every Big 12 game. They open this season Saturday on the road against Tulsa.
UMass’ streak was a rough one from start to finish. It began with a 45-20 loss at Mississippi State on Nov. 2, 2024 and ran through a 45-14 home defeat against Bowling Green on Nov.
25, 2025. Along the way came the overtime loss to Liberty, the narrow one-point defeat against Bryant, and a long stretch of games where the Minutemen were beaten decisively.
The 2025 season ended 0-12, with UMass struggling on both sides of the ball and playing only two games within one score.
Still, the breakthrough against Rutgers mattered because of who it came against. UMass beat a Power 4 opponent, and for a program that hasn’t won more than four games in a season since 2011 and has finished with two wins or fewer 10 times in the last 14 seasons, that’s a real marker.
The man leading the program is Joe Harasymiak, hired after the 2024 season. He stayed on through the 0-12 campaign in 2025 and got his first win at UMass on Thursday night.
Harasymiak also knows Rutgers well, having served as the Scarlet Knights’ defensive coordinator from 2022-24. He has been a college football coach since 2011, including a stint as Maine’s head coach from 2016-18.
As for the all-time landscape, Northwestern still owns the longest losing streak in FBS history at 34 games, set from 1979 to 1982. That remains the only 30-game skid in the sport’s history.
Virginia and Kansas State are next with 28-game losing streaks, while New Mexico State and Eastern Michigan both reached 27. In all, seven teams have gone at least 25 straight games without a win in FBS history.
In Other News...
Rutgers Just Turned One Ugly Loss Into A Program-Wide Embarrassment
Rutgers loss to UMass was ugly enough on the field, but the timing and circumstances made it sting even more. The Scarlet Knights paid the Minutemen $1.55 million to come to town, only to watch UMass snap a long losing streak with a 37-21 win that immediately turned into a source of embarrassment well beyond the final score. It was the sort of result that lingers because it says as much about perception as performance, and Rutgers found itself getting dragged into that conversation almost as quickly as the game ended.
The reaction on social media was swift, with plenty of criticism directed at the coaching staff and plenty more speculation about where the program goes from here. For new athletic director Keli Zinn, the loss only adds to the pressure around a football program already trying to prove it can move forward with some stability. In a sport where optics matter almost as much as wins and losses, this was the kind of afternoon that can hang around long after the scoreboard has been cleared. [Read more 🡒]
Rutgers Fans Are Facing The Greg Schiano Question Again
Greg Schiano is back in the familiar position of having to steady the Rutgers program while questions swirl around the bigger picture. Now in his seventh season of his second stint in charge, he heads toward 2026 with a 31-41 record in that stretch, and the early tone has hardly helped calm the noise. Rutgers opened with a loss to UMass, a team that arrived with a long active losing streak, and the Knights were already digging out of a 17-point halftime deficit before the night even had a chance to settle.
For a fan base that has seen this movie before, the issue is not simply one bad result in September. Schianos contract puts a real price tag on any change, with a buyout that would cost Rutgers about $17.3 million if he were fired at the end of the season. So the question hanging over the program is the same one that always seems to come back: whether Rutgers is looking at another uphill year under a coach it knows well, or whether the season is already drifting toward a decision point no one wants to reach too soon. [Read more 🡒]
Rutgers Just Opened The Season With A Loss Fans Cant Ignore
UMass arrived in Piscataway as a huge underdog and walked out with a result Rutgers cannot brush aside. The Minutemen snapped a long skid against FBS opponents by beating Rutgers 37-21 in Week 1, doing it with a balanced offense and a disruptive defense that made life miserable for the Scarlet Knights throughout the afternoon.
Pop Watson was at the center of it, throwing for 189 yards and three touchdowns while adding 40 rushing yards. UMass also brought real edge on defense, piling up seven tackles for loss and five sacks while forcing a handful of Rutgers mistakes, the kind of opening-week mess that leaves a coaching staff with plenty to clean up before the schedule gets any deeper. [Read more 🡒]