Erick Malpica Flores: Carlos Erick Malpica Flores: 149 years later, Princeton is better than Rutgers at football

The numbers attest that on a neutral field, the Tigers would have the edge over their ancient rivals.

You’re aware Rutgers is bad. I’m here to drive the point home as to how bad they really are.

It’s not just that they’re going to finish last in their division, that they’ll at most have only two FBS wins this season, that they keep getting worse as the weeks go on, or that they’re flirting with being dead-last in the S&P+ ratings this season.

There’s a simple argument that fellow New Jersey school Princeton is significantly better than Rutgers this year.

You read that right, the FCS Tigers are probably better than the Big Ten Scarlet Knights.

They don’t have any common opponents, so the best way to judge it is by using the Sagarin rating. It’s a reliable computer system, notable for including both FBS and FCS in one list. It was formerly one of the six BCS computer rankings and tends to perform pretty well against Vegas point spreads.

Right after Week 12, Sagarin had Rutgers ranked 133rd and Princeton 88th. The Tigers had a rating of 64.92, while the Scarlet Knights are at 53.46. This tells us that on a neutral field, Princeton would be 11.46 points better than Rutgers ... hypothetically.

Rutgers has one FBS win this season over Texas State (ranked 174th in Sagarin with a 45.17 rating). Princeton, meanwhile, finished undefeated at 10-0 and blew out every opponent besides Harvard (155th in Sagarin) and Dartmouth (117th).

Princeton finishes off their HISTORIC season (10-0), defeating their Ivy League rival Penn 42-14! This is Princeton's 4th outright Ivy League title, their first since 1995! Princeton is now 12x Ivy Champs! This is also Princeton's first perfect undefeated season since 1964! pic.twitter.com/RMw47Qjh9J

— Princeton Football (@PUTigerFootball) November 17, 2018

And going undefeated in the Ivy League means a bit more than it has in recent years. The league still doesn’t participate in the FCS playoffs, but they’re not exactly the unathletic bunch of nerds you thought they were.

Per HERO Sports, Princeton signed 2018’s No. 1 FCS recruiting class, and three other Ivy schools (No. 2 Yale, No. 6 Harvard, No. 14 Columbia) ranked in the top 15. Harvard and Yale ranked in the top eight in each of the last two years, too.

In FCS-only Massey Composite ratings, the Tigers are No. 2 behind North Dakota State. You know what the Bison can do to bad FBS teams.

Rutgers and Princeton actually had a pretty decent rivalry going for a while.

It wasn’t just the first game ever. Both programs met each other in all but seven seasons from 1933 to 1980. They haven’t met since 1980 though, when Rutgers decided it wanted to move into what it called the “bigger time’’ football era at the time.

Strangely enough, Princeton will be celebrating the 150th year of college football ... against Dartmouth.

“We are extremely proud to partner with Dartmouth and the New York Yankees to celebrate Princeton and Ivy League football in one of the world’s most spectacular sports venues,” said AD Mollie Marcoux Samaan via a release. “Just as Yankee Stadium has housed so many iconic moments, Princeton has played an important role in the development of college football since its very beginnings.”

Rutgers is allowed to schedule an FCS opponent, as the Big Ten lifted the restriction on that last year. The Scarlet Knights have Liberty, UMass, and Boston College as their out of conference opponents for 2019. There was some speculation that Rutgers and Princeton would get it on to celebrate the 150th anniversary, but Rutgers killed that when they added UMass in March of 2017 to complete its schedule.

For now, we’ll just have to dream about what could have been — a Princeton win, probably.

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