Rutgers Football and head coach Greg Schiano moved on from offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson on Sunday.
The Scarlet Knights won their first three games, but lost their last three as Big Ten play started. The defense has been solid other than the Ohio State game -- nobody seems to be able to stop the Buckeyes -- while the offense has struggled.
Outside of a 66-point performance against Wagner, Rutgers has scored just 14.6 points six games in the other five games. Rutgers overall is 104th in points per game at 22.8.
To put it simply, Schiano, on a call with reporters Sunday night, believes this team can win games right now with a competent offense the way the defense and special teams has been and can play. Nunzio Campanile is taking over as the interim OC and quarterbacks coach.
“We love Sean. He's a tireless worker. Very loyal. Just felt like it was this time best thing for me to make a change. Nunzio is going to be the interim offensive coordinator and quarterback coach, and we're going to move forward,” Schiano said. “We're going to get better and I chose at this time to do it. Certainly with the bye week, it gives us an opportunity to do some things and make some changes and experiment with a few things. We needed to do this. It's my job to make sure that we're playing complementary football. I feel our team can win many games when we play that way. As the head coach that's your job. When it's not happening you try to fix it or make a change and that's where I felt we were today.”
Rutgers led 13-0 this past Friday night at home against Nebraska and was out gaining the Cornhuskers 263-134. Rutgers squandered opportunities and tallied 348 yards to Nebraska’s 304, but was just 4-of-15 on third down and had three interceptions by Evan Simon.
Schiano said that game wasn’t the whole reason why Gleeson was fired, but it didn’t help. The Scarlet Knights are averaging a solid 160.8 yards rushing per game, but it shied away from using the ground game in the second half of the last game. Rutgers is also 114th in the country in passing offense and is only ahead of Iowa in the conference. But remember, Rutgers has just six passing scores all year and four came against Wagner. Rutgers has had turnover issues at quarterback, too, and that means takeaways, injuries, and constant flip-flopping.
“Certain things over time build up and I gave it a lot of thought obviously since the end of the game Friday night. But it wasn't as a result of Friday night that this occurred,” Schiano said. “I really gave it a lot of thought all day Saturday and well into Sunday and just felt like this was the time.”
Rutgers wasn’t getting enough from Gleeson from a developmental standpoint and from a play calling perspective.
“I think they're both an issue and I think one feeds to the other,” Schiano said. “So development of our offense at two and a half years in and what you see on game day, those two things come together and at this point I just felt like we needed to do this.
“Several things that have occurred that we don't have enough hours in the day to go through all the small errors to all the structural issues that you can get into with the question. A lot of times you question things and after the question, we realize, you know what, this is the best way. At the end of the day in college football, you need to score points and we just don't score enough points. I want our offense to be as much of a weapon as our defense. I believe we can win if we can get that side of the ball cleaned up a little bit. It's hard to do. Really hard.”
Campanile, who is in his fifth season at Rutgers, served as the team’s interim head coach and offensive coordinator in the final eight games of the 2019 season. He’ll be calling plays for the last seven games in 2022. Schiano took over in December of 2019 for Chris Ash and kept Campanile on board.
“I don't remember that much. I watched some of those games when I first got here to get familiar with the players,” Schiano said. “But I've known Nunzio for 20 years and his family. I followed his career and I was always very impressed with the job he did running offenses and coaching quarterbacks. He's put a bunch of quarterbacks into Division-I football. He has two or three guys that ended up being an NFL quarterback. I think it's more of an accumulation of my experiences with Nuns over the years that led me to elevate him to the position.”
Rutgers is on its bye week right now, and it has two weeks to make any alterations to the offense and try and get things on track. If Rutgers wants to make a bowl game, and score points, and play complementary football in all three areas, it starts in practice and in meetings now even before the home game versus the Hoosiers on Oct. 22.
“Not going to give away too much because one of the advantages we have is we have a two-week period before we play Indiana,” Schiano said. “So there will be some uncertainty offensively, but I want to have a multifaceted offense that uses tempo as a tool and as a weapon, but not as a constant. That's kind of where we are headed. But it's an execution-based offense and we need to improve on that.”
Schiano isn’t diving fully into who will be calling plays on offense in 2023, but Campanile has an opportunity right in front of him to be that guy.
“He is a candidate, yes. He has a seven-week job interview. I think he's a talented QB coach. Development of quarterbacks is going to be an integral part of us being successful on offense,” Schiano said. “And I think he's got a lot of experience at running offenses and coaching quarterbacks. I think he was the man for this time.
“My main focus is our football team right now. It's not like you don't have guys already that you always keep on your shortlist. So that's not an issue. But right now my focus is 100% on our football team. I believe this year if we play complementary we can win. That's why it happened now.”
Follow Chris Nalwasky on Twitter @ChrisNalwasky.
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