PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- Greg Schiano tells his team the same thing every week, that each Big East game is a championship game.

Next week, that will actually be the case.

With its 20-3 win over Cincinnati on Saturday at High Point Solutions Stadium, Rutgers moved into a first-place tie with Louisville -- both are 4-2 in conference play. And with a win at UConn next Saturday in their regular-season finale, the Scarlet Knights would clinch at least a share of their first Big East title.

"It means a lot," said Schiano, in his 11th season as head coach. "I remember when [former athletic director] Bob Mulcahy hired me, we talked about it. We said, 'Hey, we're gonna get there but we're gonna do it right.' When Tim [Pernetti] took over, we had the same conversation: We're gonna get there, but we're gonna do it right. We're not gonna sacrifice what we believe in to get there.

Jawan Jamison bowled over the Bearcats with 200 yards and two TDs on 34 carries. Patrick McDermott/Getty Images

"We're not there yet, but we're gonna have a chance next week."

Rutgers (8-3) has that chance because of a complete domination of Cincinnati, which entered the game 7-2 overall and 3-1 in Big East play. The Scarlet Knights controlled the ball for more than 38 minutes, had more than twice as many first downs and outgained the Bearcats by 160 yards.

Redshirt freshman Jawan Jamison carried the ball 34 times for 200 yards and scored both Rutgers touchdowns, becoming only the third freshman in school history to rush for 200 or more yards in a game. And he did it against a Cincinnati team that was ranked second in the country in rushing defense, giving up just 81.4 yards per game on the ground.

Rutgers, on the other hand, was the third-worst rushing team in the country, averaging just 90.4 yards per game.

"The way we ran the football, that's who we want to be," Schiano said. "[Jamison] looked fresh, he made people miss, he kept things going forward. It was excellent."

Jamison accumulated 136 of his yards after halftime. "In the second half, you could tell, they were a little beat down," he said. "And we just kept punishing them."

"We pride ourselves on being able to stop the run on defense and we weren't able to do that today," Cincinnati coach Butch Jones said. "Rutgers controlled the line offensively and defensively."

On the other side of the ball, Rutgers almost pitched a shutout against a team that was averaging 37.1 points per game. The Bearcats were without starting quarterback Zach Collaros, who broke his right ankle in a loss to West Virginia last week.

Sophomore Munchie Legaux made his first career start in Collaros' place, and completed just 12 of his 31 passes.

The game couldn't have been more different than last year's matchup between these teams, in which the Cincinnati offense racked up 661 total yards in a 69-38 annihilation.

But star linebacker Khaseem Greene insisted that last season's defeat wasn't Rutgers' motivation in this game.

"That stuff from last year wasn't even talked about," Greene said. "We don't need that to motivate us. We don't need last year to motivate us. We got each other to motivate us."

That 31-point loss to Cincinnati was the fourth of six consecutive losses to end last season for Rutgers, a streak which started the week after Eric LeGrand injured his spinal cord covering a kickoff against Army and was paralyzed.