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Rutgers announced today the beginning of a home and home series with Washington State earlier today, filling in the last game slots for 2014 and 2015. Instead of playing in Pullman, where Martin Stadium is located, the Knights will travel to Seattle to play the Cougars at CenturyLink Field in 2014. Washington State will make the trip to Piscataway in 2015.
This is in addition to the game at Fresno State this coming season, as well as the already announced home and home series with UCLA for 2016 and 2017. The scheduling gives Rutgers a presence on the west coast for the next five years and should increase national coverage of RU, which never hurts with recruiting. The aggressive non-conference scheduling is a welcome departure from the mid-2000 era, when two FCS teams would sometimes be on the season slate. Coach Flood even went so far today to accuse a couple of SEC schools from ducking RU in non-conference play. While I doubt that the SEC schools in question were really "ducking" RU, it's nice to see Kyle try to build up the swagger of the program.
Additional future non-conference opponents are Kansas (2015, 2018) and Miami FL (2018, 2019).