(photo courtesy of Heights Sports)

Johnny Langan stood on the sidelines as a backup the last time Rutgers played at home. Against his former team Boston College, he could only watch his home-state Scarlet Knights let a competitive game slip away in the fourth quarter. The Eagles third win of the season in Langan’s absence, marked the 13th loss in 15 games for Rutgers.

But when Langan takes the field in Piscataway on Saturday against Maryland, he will kick-off a hard reset for the Knights’ program after the firing of former head coach Chris Ash. The first game of post-Ash era will feature the former Bergen Catholic standout starting at quarterback

“The way I see it, he has to be one of 11 players doing his job," said Rutgers interim head coach Nunzio Campanile according to the Daily Targum. "We're not going to put the game on him. We've got some pretty good players out there, and we're going to make sure we put the ball in the hands of the guys that make plays and win the game for us."

Campanile and Langan were united as a head coach and quarterback duo once before. The game between Rutgers and Maryland this Saturday will be the first reunion between the two New Jersey natives since they delivered Bergen Catholic its first state championship in 13 years in 2017 at Metlife Stadium.

That would also be the year Langan committed to play at Boston College under head coach Steve Addazio. It was a decision aided by the guidance of Campanile, who took the job as the Rutgers running backs coach the very next year.

As fate would have it, now Campanile will now open his collegiate head coaching career with the same quarterback that he closed his high school head coaching career with. This circumstances comes at the expense of the now-fired offensive coordinator John McNulty, who originally led the charge to bring Langan over from Boston College.

"He's family to me. He's been a great mentor in my life the past six or seven years, so it's really special that I'm going to get coaching from him again," Langan said of Campanile back in the Spring.

A serendipitous situation is only emphasized by the unlikelihood of it prior to this week, dating back to the summer in particular.

Back in July, Langan was denied eligibility to play in 2019 by the NCAA. The decision to transfer from Boston at the end of his redshirt freshman season culminated in a process that required a last-minute appeal by Langan’s camp just to give him a chance this season.

"Things didn't really work out for me at BC. There was talk about a position change … and I wasn’t about that,” said Langan according to NJ Advance Media in December. “I had a couple good talks with coach McNulty and they have some plans of adding a little bit more athletic play to the quarterback room.”



In mid August, his appeal was finally approved. The timing of that appeal, all of a sudden made Langan a surprise entree in a training camp quarterback competition between Rutgers sophomore Artur Sitkowski and another transfer, graduate senior McLane Carter from Texas Tech.

Langan’s late entree in that competition did not allot him a legitimate chance to win the starting job, as the coaching staff at the time had no plans to utilize his skills the offense. He was listed as the third quarterback behind Sitkowski and Carter who would own the starting job for only one game.

Circumstance has already taken its toll on the Rutgers quarterback room this season. A concussion in Rutgers’ second game has kept Carter sidelined for three weeks now, and Sitkowski announced on Thursday his intention to sit out the rest of the season to redshirt. That’s all it took to elevate Langan to a Big Ten QB1 in the first week of October.

Now, Langan and Campanile kick-off a game with a greater deal of consequence than each of Rutgers’ last three season openers as first-timers in each of their positions at the college level. Langan will get his first taste of meaningful college football after not seeing the field in his first and only season with the Eagles and it will come very close to home.

The decision to return home, aided by a sequence of events that required every detail to fall right to yield this result, has given Langan the break he couldn’t seem to catch at Boston College. His time with the Eagles, under head coach Steve Addazio, was just as necessary a stepping stone in Langan’s journey to his start on Saturday. A game with a lot of relevance to New Jersey football fans, a group that Addazio himself originates from.

“Certainly New Jersey always has and always will be—let’s call that a home area for us,” Addazio told BCEagles.com at this year’s National Signing Day press conference. "That’s not a new phenomenon in the last five or six years. I mean it’s been that way for a long time, and it makes sense that it would be that way.”