Greg Schiano's Return To Rutgers Is Exactly What The Moribund Program Needed

To understand why the Rutgers fan base has been whipped into a frenzy over a football coach who was one game over .500 during his 11 seasons at the school in his first go-around you need a brief primer on the history of Rutgers football.

No school has been at the sport longer. You’d think, after 150 years of trying, they would have gotten this football thing down pat by now. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then everyone associated with Rutgers football should have monogrammed strait jackets by now.

When Greg Schiano took over as Rutgers coach the first time in 2001, he inherited a program with Patriot League facilities whose bowl history consisted of a single appearance in the postseason. That was the 1978 Garden State Bowl, a game played several exits north on the New Jersey Turnpike in the old Giants Stadium.

Schiano’s predecessor, Terry Shea, once came up with the quaint notion of replacing the spring game with a scrimmage between his starters and an alumni team.

The alumni team, led by a 40-something quarterback who had not taken a snap in 20 years, won, 7-6.

Shea was so inept – 11-44 for his five years – that he was named Big East Coach of the Year for going 5-6. He won two league games that year, beating Pittsburgh and Temple. The feeling was that Big East coaches voted him the honor to keep him around since he was on the verge of being fired.

When Schiano arrived, he had his new strength and conditioning coach, Jay Butler, put the team through physical testing.

Butler’s assessment?

“They are weaker than the weakest Ivy League team,” he announced.

Schiano took his lumps early, going 3-20 his first two seasons at Rutgers, but the change in attitude around the program was palpable. No state is more self-loathing than New Jersey, and Rutgers football, which had aspirations of being Princeton Monday through Friday and Michigan on Saturdays, represented that perfectly. But Schiano was different. He was a Jersey guy. He got it. He also knew how to change it.

Eventually, the state’s high school coaches and players bought in. During his introductory press conference on Wednesday, Gov. Phil Murphy was on hand, having helped broker Schiano’s return. The state’s high school football coaches’ association has already pushed back its annual December meeting to accommodate Schiano as the keynote speaker. The starting quarterback, who had entered the transfer portal, withdrew his name.

In six of his final seven years at Rutgers he led the program to bowl games. He produced multiple first-round NFL draft picks – Jersey guys – and peaked with an 11-2 season in 2006 that saw Rutgers finish No. 12 nationally in the polls. Rutgers was No. 14 in the Big Ten this season.

The single greatest moment in the football program’s history, the victory over No. 3-ranked Louisville in 2006, came under his watch.

Under Schiano, the facilities improved dramatically. The stadium got much-needed upgrades. Attitudes changed. Rutgers athletics in general began emerging from years of embarrassment. A sleeping giant? A comatose giant was more like it for too long. Consider that the past seven Rutgers men’s basketball coaches have all been fired. That’s almost inconceivable given that you can stand on top of the basketball arena, throw a basketball and more likely than not hit a Division 1 prospect.

Rutgers, with one of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the country, has not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1991.

Schiano had his shortcomings. All coaches do. He made some curious in-game decisions at times, could never solve West Virginia, and never won a league title in 11 years. But he’s a Jersey guy who understood the state and, more importantly, understood Rutgers, a school so self-conscious about spending money on athletics that it almost always makes decisions based on the cheapest way out possible.

He was also scandal free and his players went to class, and excelled there, and the same could not be said for Kyle Flood, who succeeded Schiano. Flood secretly met with a professor in an effort to have a player’s grade changed and then had a half-dozen players arrested for a variety of crimes. He was fired. In fact, Schiano is the only Rutgers football coach since 1972 who was not fired.

Upon his arrival at Rutgers, Schiano summoned a media member to his office. He’d come from Miami, then one of just five schools in the country with an open locker room policy for the media and wanted to know the pros and cons of having an open locker room at Rutgers.

He chose to open it. That small gesture meant a lot to the folks covering the team. Schiano, who has a tireless work ethic, never overlooked even the slightest details when it came to his program.

So don’t be fooled by the 68-67 record during his 11 seasons the first time around. No Rutgers coach has ever galvanized the state the way Schiano has and can. He has even made all of his corny catch-phrases – Keep Chopping – things that the most cynical Rutgers fan has embraced. The guy is so popular in New Jersey that he was able to overcome the athletic director’s attempts to sabotage his hiring. They were both smiling, side by side, along with the governor at his introductory press conference.

He may not be a fit at other schools. He failed in the NFL. But he fits at Rutgers as few coaches ever have. That doesn’t mean immediate results. Heck, he may lose his opener to Monmouth next season. Chris Ash, Schiano’s predecessor this time around, did that much harm to the program.

But he will make Rutgers respectable in the long run, and for a school in the same division as Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State, being respectable – Indiana this year, for example; Iowa most years – should be more than enough. It sure beats embarrassing.