Rutgers has played 21 road Big Ten games since joining the conference in 2014. Ron and Joanna Garutti attended each one, and it’s where the concept of planting a towering bronze statue outside the Rutgers football stadium was born.

“Every campus that we’ve been to, whether it was the Nittany Lion statue at Penn State, the Spartan statue at Michigan State, the Wildcat statue at Northwestern — it was always a place where people would congregate and take photos,’’ said Ron Garutti, who has attended every Rutgers football game since 2007 — a streak of 148 games heading into he 2019 campaign. “It was on one of those (Big Ten) trips that got us thinking about doing something like that here (at Rutgers). For years, we’ve said Rutgers doesn’t have that. Why is that? We talked about it for awhile, and finally we decided at the end of the football season 2016 we should do it.’’

Rutgers last week announced the dedication of a 12-foot high statue portraying an armored Scarlet Knight raising his sword while atop a rearing horse after vanquishing an opponent in battle. The “Victory’’ statue is under construction by the Randolph Rose Collection of Yonkers, N.Y., and is expected to be completed within the North Gate Plaza of HighPoint.com Stadium in time for the Scarlet Knights’ season opener against UMass.

In a wide-ranging interview, Garutti said it was a two-year process to formulate plans and design what will end up being a 2,500-pound statue mounted on a 5 1/2-foot black granite pedestal.

Garutti is paying the entire tab on a project that will end up costing ““well over a half-million dollars’’ when it’s unveiled Aug. 30.

“Really, it’s a work of art,’’ Garutti said. “Joanna and I are big on tradition, loyalty, pride, ancestry. We were looking for something of a legacy project that would have permanence. There’s nothing like a bronze statue to do that. There’s nothing that says ‘football’ on the statue. It happens to be outside the football stadium but it is our hope that this statue, as imposing as it will be, will be a source of pride for the entire Rutgers community, to all athletic teams, to current Rutgers students, to high school students when they visit with their parents, to faculty, to donors. We’re a Big Ten university. We all should be proud. We really do hope that ‘Victory,’ the statue, will become symbolic of the university, inspiring people to say, ‘Wow, that statue is befitting of a great university that Rutgers is.’ ‘’

After meeting with officials from the Randolph Rose Collection, Garutti said he pitched the idea to Rutgers football coach Chris Ash and Athletics Director Pat Hobbs during a game at Yankee Stadium in April 2017.

“There was a Rutgers event at Yankee Stadium and I went there and mentioned it to Coach Ash (and) he thought it was a great idea, and then Pat arrived and he thought it was a great idea, too,’’ Garutti said. “This was on nobody’s radar. This was not budgeted. It wasn’t like Rutgers said in the next year or two we need a donor to build a statue. This was our initiation because we’ve been on so many (Big Ten) campuses and seen a statue that’s representative of the mascot or something representing the tradition of the university and Rutgers didn’t have that.’’

A physician who spent 30 years bringing new drugs to market in the pharmaceutical industry, Garutti has been one of the athletic program’s most prominent donors for more than a decade. In 2016, he and Joanna donated $1.25 million to upgrade the Hale Center strength and conditioning room used by the football team and he completed one of the few fully endowed football scholarships to the Rutgers football program in 2014.

Garutti declined to disclose how much he’s given to the Rutgers athletics program, but one can add up his reported gifts and assume he’s given close to $3 million lifetime.

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“I’ve always been very proud to be a Rutgers graduate,’’ Garutti said. “It may sound trite but my father, mercy on his soul, would ask, ‘Why would you do what you do for Rutgers? It’s Georgetown that made you a doctor.’ I’d say, ‘Dad, I don’t know how to answer that. There’s just something about the place.’

“I’m proud of Rutgers, and I wish other people in the Rutgers community would be similarly proud. We’re a great public research AAU university, one of the top 25 research universities in the country. There’s so many great things happening here, and that’s why pride is such a big part of this statue. It’s very personal why people do anything they do. I do firmly believe that top-notch academic excellence can go hand-in-hand with top-notch athletics excellence. We’re in the Big Ten and that’s exactly where Rutgers should be. We are the state university of New Jersey, and we finally are in a conference of our peers. We have made historical progress over the last five years. We’ve never built facilities like this but we still need to improve the culture of philanthropy and that’s where everyone associated with the university needs to step up. And the people saying, ‘When we get good then we will start contributing’ got it all wrong. The message that I would say is we need to be investing now in order to have success. And that’s part of the commitment, and hopefully the example, that Joanna and I are showing people once again.’’

Keith Sargeant may be reached at ksargeant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @KSargeantNJ. Find NJ.com Rutgers Football on Facebook.