The Rutgers message boards started on a site called Exit 109 in the mid 90"s. I used to access it on dialup with Prodigy as my ISP. Some famous posters include Mike from West Orange who also used to appear on a radio show usually bashing Rutgers sports, and Big Dog (a former RU football player) who then went on to start his own site. Rivals went by another name and was run by Keith something or other. Not sure if Exit 109 morphed into another name I believe before morphing into 247. Brian Dohn ran that site and we would have a weekly recruiting online chat (typed, not audio). Finally, the main moderators of the original Rivals left for 247 some years ago.
Take a look at the first few posts in this thread, which contain links to the history of this site. Mike Fasano ran Exit 109 (with BigDog as a major contributor), which eventually merged with Keith Burkert's Rutgersfan.com in 1998 (he's the guy that wrote the history) and they eventually found a home with Rivals (twice, lol) and are still with Rivals today, obviously. Some more info on other boards, below, mostly from memory, so it might not be 100% accurate.
A few years after Rutgersfan.com hooked up with Rivals in 1998, Mike and BigDog started the Scout board in mid-2001, as far as I can tell, as that's the oldest post on the 247 site I could find; Scout eventually became 247 Sports, probably around 2010, when 247 became a big player in the field. I posted sparingly on Scout back in the day.
And then in April 2018, John O and most of the staff from this site left Rivals for 247 (rebranded ScarletNation), taking over for Sam Hellman who had taken over from BigDog years earlier, but then left 247 in 2018. When that happened, Richie became site publisher for this site. Some Rivals/Rutgersfan posters moved over to 247, some became posters on both and quite a few went over, saw the crappy board technology, and came back here. I post on both boards, but more here, although the board technology over there is far better than it was in 2018.
Also, around the same time as Scout was formed (2001-2002, if I recall correctly), some posters from Rutgersfan broke away and formed the Grease Truck forum, which is a small, but slightly twisted RU sports community, lol - I posted there for several years, but haven't posted there in many years now.
