PISCATAWAY, N.J. - It was an awkward sight, to say the least: Rutgers football captain Raheem Blackshear standing on the sidelines, dressed and healthy, watching the offense struggle against Maryland Saturday.

He was loitering at the far end of the Scarlet Knights’ bench amidst a bunch of of freshmen who, like him, had no chance of entering the game.

The difference is, Blackshear benched himself. It came out just before kickoff that the junior running back decided he’d rather redshirt than take more beatings this fall —following the lead of starting quarterback Art Sitkowski, who pulled the plug on the 2019 season earlier this week.

If you’re a fan who is repulsed by this, that’s understandable. It certainly reeks of “I” before “team,” which goes counter to everything we’ve loved and preached about sports for generations. But take a step back and assess the big picture. These decisions are not being made in a selfish vacuum. They are part of a cultural shift — in college sports, where athletes are empowered like never before, and particularly in football, where we grasp the game’s dangers better than our fathers and grandfathers.

So here is a debate with two passionate sides, and both have some merit. This is a thorny issue with lots of gray area, complexity, nuance. That might seem unsatisfying in the 240-character echo chambers we’ve created, but it’s reality.

Let’s try to stand in the shoes of all stakeholders here.

Put yourselves in Sitkowsi’s shoes. He had become a human pinata, pounded behind a porous offensive line. Have you seen some of the whacks he took this fall? Then his head coach and his offensive coordinator got ousted. The program is in chaos, getting stampeded weekly, the butt of jokes and memes. Should he put his health on the line for that, especially in an era when college stars are skipping bowl games — bowl games! — for fear of injury?

Put yourself in Blackshear’s shoes. He saw Sitkowski cut bait — and his prospects of becoming a tackling dummy rise as Rutgers went to a third-string quarterback and a play-caller who was roaming Bergen Catholic's sidelines two years ago.

Put yourself in interim head coach Nunzio Campanile’s shoes. Allowing these guys to wash their hands of the team but still wear the colors on gameday probably goes against everything he’s stood for as a guy who’s molded kids into men for 20 years. But he’s in a precarious spot, smack in the middle of a program and sport in transition.

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“I can’t tell you that I had the best answer to deal with that on short notice," Campanile said during his postgame press conference. "It’s something we will address obviously over the course of this week and we’ll address it in a way our team is comfortable with.”

Campanile noted that the two cases are not quite the same — Sitkowski agreed to be the emergency quarterback, leaving the door open to a possible return this season. Word is Blackshear's pullout happened late, just hours before the game.

“Am I disappointed by it? Incredibly," Campanile said. "Do I understand it? I guess so, I guess that’s the world way the world is now.”

He added, "This is a game about a team. It’s about sacrificing personal accomplishment for the success of the team. But if that’s the world they’re living in and they’ve got a lot of people telling them, ‘Worry about you, worry about you,’ I get it. I’m raising two boys and I’m trying to raise them about being willing to sacrifice some of the things they want to do for the people around them.”

“But I get it. He (Blackshear) is a great kid and we’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.”

Put yourself in their teammates’ shoes. They took the field Saturday against Maryland, representing Rutgers in the toughest of times, putting their own health on the line when those two other guys said, "nah." They absorbed the business end of a 48-7 shellacking from a weak Terrapins squad, and it’s only going to get worse with Minnesota, Ohio State, Michigan State and Penn State waiting down the line. Those four teams entered Saturday’s action with a combined record of 17-1.

Here is what five of them said about it after the game.

Drew Singleton, sophomore linebacker: “I support them. I definitely support them. Those guys are my brothers.”

Freshman quarterback Johnny Langan, who was pressed into service as the starter: “We’re all that we’ve got right now. Whoever is with us, we’ll take that and play as hard as we can . . . It’s not something I can really control . . . It’s their decision, their life. Just focus on the guys we have.”

Tyshon Fogg, junior linebacker: “At the end of the day we love those guys. We support those guys’ decisions . . . I’m going to support them all of the way.”

Daevon Robinson, sophomore receiver: “We just try to play with who we have. If that’s their decision . . . we don’t have too much say on it.”

Senior lineman Zach Venesky, who suffered a right leg injury and was in a walking boot: “It’s a brotherhood. I support both Art and Blackshear. If you look on the sidelines they are two guys who are cheering everyone on and that’s what it’s all about.”

Put yourself in fans’ shoes. Year after year they invest, financially and emotionally, in Rutgers. That takes a lot more dedication than investing in Alabama. Yet there was captain Jonah Jackson, skipping town in January, blowing off his senior season to join the parade at Ohio State. He didn’t even leave the division.

There was Eugene Omoruyi, the captain and undisputed leader of Rutgers’ improving basketball team, defecting in the wee hours of a late-May night with an Instagram post that badly misspelled his coach’s name. He surfaced at Oregon, which collected a bunch of shiny new parts in the offseason.

Sitkowski and Blackshear haven’t transferred yet, but for the invested fan the pattern is hard to stomach.

They should learn to cope, though, because this is the age of athlete empowerment and it’s not changing. More than a few folks who make a living in college sports think the transfer penalty will be gone soon. A one-year sit-out is increasingly hard to justify as millionaire coaches hopscotch jobs — moves that their players sometimes find out about through media reports.

Bottom line: You don’t have to like what Blackshear and Sitkowski did today, and don’t let any NCAA-hating cultist tell you otherwise. But if you care about the future of college sports, you must understand why it happened. In 2019, the captain doesn’t have to go down with the ship.