Things are so bad at Rutgers that it's now a touchdown underdog at home against Liberty

This does not happen to Big Ten programs very often

Rutgers is a 7.5-point underdog at home against Liberty this week. In the history of bad things that have happened to Rutgers since joining the Big Ten, this might be the worst.

The line stood out to me when perusing games for this weekend to pick in The Six Pack. My immediate thought was trying to figure out if a Big Ten program had ever been an underdog of a touchdown or more at home in a nonconference game against a non-Power Five program. So I dug out my old Phil Steele magazines to see if my inkling was correct. It wasn't, but I wasn't far off.

I went back to 2005, and in the seasons that have passed since then, I found one such instance (it's happened three times against Notre Dame, but Notre Dame is considered a Power Five program). Back in 2013, Illinois found itself as a 7.5-point underdog at home to Cincinnati. It was the first season of the American Athletic Conference, which formed with the remaining football members of the Big East.

There's a slight difference between that 2013 Cincinnati team and this 2019 Liberty team, though. It was the second game of the 2013 season, and the Bearcats were coming off a 10-3 record in 2012. Since 2007, Cincinnati had gone 57-21, winning at least 10 games in five of the previous six seasons under Brian Kelly and Butch Jones. Jones left Cincinnati for the Tennessee job before 2013, and the Cincinnati job was so appealing that Tommy Tuberville left Texas Tech to take it. Also, while it's a bit of a technicality, while the AAC is labeled a Group of Five conference now, it was still a BCS conference in 2013 before the implementation of the College Football Playoff. And Rutgers was still a member of it.

Compare that to Liberty. The Flames are 5-2 this season, and they deserve to be favored against Rutgers. Even so, the Flames are only in their second season as an FBS program. The program, which was created in 2006, spent last season as a provisional member of the FBS. And in its second season as an FBS program -- its 20th game -- it is more than a touchdown favorite on the road against a Big Ten team. This says a lot about what Liberty has been able to accomplish in a short time.

Unfortunately, it also says a lot about the state of Rutgers football. A program that was described to me by a coordinator for a Power Five program as "a Big Ten school in name only." It appears the sportsbooks that set lines share this assessment.

If there's good news for Rutgers, when Illinois was a 7.5-point underdog to Cincinnati in 2013, it went on to win the game 45-17. One of only four games that Illini team would win. Maybe Rutgers will have the same kind of success in this spot.

Of course, even if it doesn't, at least it still has that New York market cornered.