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An Unhealthily Rabid Rutgers Fan’s Post-Mortem On The Greg Schiano Era

It’s personal, too

It’s no wonder – 11 years in one place is a long time in modern college football – and why ultimately, it’s hard to fault him for a lack of loyalty in leaving. Hell, I practically feel like I owe him a personal debt. As I’ve mentioned approximately 30,000 times on this site, I’m a Rutgers alum. As I haven’t mentioned 30,000 times, I spent much of my undergraduate career – especially the first three years – not enjoying myself that much, not making friends, and generally being in a state where I identified with this piece a lot more than I wish I did.

The exception: Schiano’s program. I even remember thinking going into my sophomore year – the last month or so of my freshman year was the roughest patch – how much it was going to suck if the football team, my main source of Rutgers-related entertainment, wasn’t any good (this was before they’d started being reliably solid). The first semester of my sophomore year: fall 2006. This season. Yeah, it had the heartbreaking West Virginia loss I mentioned earlier. It also had 11 wins, a No. 12 national ranking, and the Louisville game. For all my “so close” talk, the Louisville game was not a “so close” situation. It was such a perfect night it still seems hard to believe it was even real.

Schiano made it all happen, and he stuck around long enough that the dark days of Shea are a distant memory. But as tough as that makes it to question his loyalty to the program – he turned down Miami and Michigan in consecutive years, for crying out loud – it’s much easier to question how well-equipped he is to handle the NFL. Sure, he won some games. He produced NFL players in quantities unheard of for Rutgers. He ran a pro-style offense (except for a couple ill-fated seasons), and his ability to coach a defense is not in question.

Smart move?

But Schiano also took after (and coached for several years under) Joe Paterno, who stuck around the college game for just a while. Schiano also seemed to be one of the few coaches who paid more than lip service to academics. His terrific handling of the terrible, though later inspiring, Eric LeGrand situation spoke to a personal connection he’d built with his players and program that’s next to impossible in the pros. And what definitely won’t be possible in Tampa Bay, as Levy also touched on: the level of control over his team Schiano enjoyed in Piscataway.

OK, so maybe Schiano was unhappy about the conference raids, as the musical chairs game left the Big East in shambles and Rutgers (for now, at least) without a home in a more stable conference. He’s still leaving a program with a promising future, and one he could – and did – bend to his will. Rutgers gave him everything it possibly could have – and arguably, much more than it should have. The school gave him a huge, long-term contract that, had Schiano’s program ever gone into an irreversible downward spiral, it would have been nearly impossible to get out of. It improved facilities dramatically for him. It expanded the stadium for him. Schiano built his own little empire, with an autonomy he almost certainly won’t find anywhere else.

So now all we can do is wait and see. Wait and see how Schiano does with the Bucs. (We’re not terribly optimistic for him, but you never know.) Wait and see who Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti picks to replace Schiano and hopefully deliver on those promises of championships he couldn’t keep: his goal is to get it done by signing day, a tall task. Three names getting play are Florida International head coach Mario Cristobal, Temple head coach Steve Addazio, and Notre Dame defensive coordinator Bob Diaco. All three could potentially do very good jobs. None of the three are anywhere close to sure things.

Pretty, pretty, pretty good

And whoever gets the job will have a tough act to follow. In the final analysis, Gregory Edward Schiano’s legacy in the Rutgers football program is a positive one, whether his departure breaks up his close-at-hand best class ever or not. The departure is indeed the cost of doing business in the college sports world.

And Rutgers is any kind of player in that world mostly thanks to one person. That last point hit me in a weird way yesterday, as I was watching one of the 25,000 SportsCenter updates in the Schiano-to-the-Bucs story, I thought, “You know, even given the circumstances, this is pretty cool to see Rutgers’ name plastered all over the TV like this.” In the area of receiving national recognition, at least, Rutgers is more than so close – it’s already there. And just as I imagined Schiano saying about his hypothetical recruiting class…that’s all him.

Photos: Getty (by Rich Schultz), via, via

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