One of, if not the best coaches in Rutgers Football history is Greg Schiano. The former Scarlet Knights football coach was interested in a return to the banks but earlier this week news broke that Schiano and the Rutgers administration parted ways after negotiations stalled.
Here’s my case for why Schiano is not only the best option, but Rutgers’ only option.
It has now been eight seasons since Schiano was the man in charge of the Scarlet Knights and it’s also been an ugly seven years both on and off the field for the program.
There has also been countless off the field incidents since Schiano left — players breaking into houses, credit card scandals -- and heck, there was even a player on Chris Ash’s team that was charged with attempted murder.
Due to lack of facilities, lack of funding from the university and just the difficulty of the job here at Rutgers, there isn’t a huge list of candidates that are willing to come in right away and takeover this job.
The rebuild is steep.
However, the one man who had the program ranked nationally on the gridiron and in the classroom is Schiano and the N.J. native wants to come back home and try to replicate what he once did. But the administration won't make it happen.
When you talk with people about Schiano, especially former players, you hear a lot about how he values honesty and integrity and about how he was more than just a coach to most of his players.
"I am very blessed to have coach Schiano in my life," former RU quarterback Ryan Hart told TKR in a recent phone interview. "He has helped mold me into the person and man that I am today. That is a unique trait that most young men playing athletics need in their lives to be successful. He has an infectious personality that will re-energize this state and ban base overnight. His former players fighting for him to come back is all the proof you need."
One of the biggest sayings that Rutgers adopted when coach Schiano was in charge was F.A.M.I.L.Y. and it stood for “Forget About Me I Love You”. This was a mantra that his teams took with them both on and off the field, just ask one of his former star quarterbacks.
"On the field is obviously where a lot of his culture building started, because you spend so much time on the football field," Mike Teel told TKR in a recent interview. "For a lot of us it was a group of guys who came together from all over the map and all over the country. How do you get those guys to mesh and trust each other? So there was always things that he would do to get us more comfortable as a group. Usually the receivers hung out with other receivers and the line hung out with other linemen, etc. However, Greg would put different guys in different groups to make you uncomfortable, but to also make you learn more about other teammates.
"I remember being in a group with Eric Foster, Cameron Stephenson and one of the McCourty brothers. At the time I had some trouble remember which one of them was which. So you'd have four different guys from different backgrounds and places and he would task us to do certain things as a group. He was very conscious of that.
"The '06 team was really the closest team I was ever apart of, the defensive guys hung out with the offensive guys, the DBs were with the O-Line and that I believe was part of the reason for our success. It was that forget about me I love you culture and it was preached upon and it wasn't just words, it was brought to action."
It isn’t just a catchy saying for Schiano, it’s more a lifestyle type of thing. He helped to instill that family culture into his players, coaches and administrators alike. Former assistant PJ Fleck spoke very highly of Schiano just a couple months ago when his Golden Gophers came to Piscataway to take on Rutgers.
“He’s one of the best coaches I’ve ever seen,” Fleck said. “He’s the biggest coaching influence in my life. I came to him a boy and I left a man. I learned more college football, I learned more business, more how to treat people, more X’s and O’s, more discipline and more work ethic from that man than I have learned from anybody in my entire life. I owe my entire coaching career to him and I text him every week and I know he’s sick of hearing it. He’s a special man in my life. He is a head football coach.”
As mentioned before, it was not only an ugly eight years off the field, but we’ve also seen some horrid performances on the field too. Rutgers has posted a record of 36-52 since Schiano left and won a total of three games over the past 23 contests.
Ash went 8-32 before he was fired in late September.
While Schiano’s record is slightly above .500 (68-67), most fail to ignore the fact that he was 56-33 in his last seven seasons as head coach. The one losing season came the year when LeGrand was injured and paralyzed from the neck down. LeGrand told the WRSU crew and myself on the radio on Monday that he truly believes that year the team would’ve made another bowl game had he not been injured the way he was.
“We lost every game after my injury because of how devastated the team was and it was a shock to the team,” LeGrand said in a radio interview on WRSU. “I promise you we would’ve been to a bowl game that year if I didn’t get hurt and the record would’ve been much different.”
One of the arguments a lot of people bring up is that Schiano has lost his recruiting juice and he can’t recruit the same way he used. However, most don’t know that Schiano was one of, if not the top recruiter in the Big Ten conference last season.
Schiano was the point man for various Ohio State recruits, helping the Buckeyes land Nick Petit-Frere (No. 1 OT in 2018), Matthew Jones (No. 7 OG in 2018) and TE Jeremy Ruckert (No. 3 TE in 2018). Not to mention he’s already pretty popular among recruits in the 2020 class too.
TKR’s Alex Gleitman recently polled a couple of the tri-state area’s top high school recruits to get their thoughts on Schiano and the anonymous quotes below are great examples of why Schiano still has it when it comes to recruiting.
Anonymous Power-Five commit: “With Schiano hired, I’ll definitely give Rutgers a second look. We all know about his defensive prowess and the fact that he has turned Rutgers around before---that makes Rutgers more attractive with him there.”
Anonymous Power-Five commit: “I’m solid with (P5 school), but with Greg Schiano at Rutgers, that's now the program that kids from around here will dream about going to."
To say that Schiano can’t relate or even recruit some of the top prospects in this area in today’s world is just an outright lie.
Finally, the university has been losing a ton of money over the past couple of football seasons as season tickets numbers have dwindled and now donors are pulling their funds to prove a point.
This past season alone the total number of season tickets is now down to just 16,585 total according to a report from NJ Advance Media. And according to multiple fans on social media and the message boards, that number will continue to go down if Schiano is not the next head coach.
So AD Pat Hobbs, President Dr. Robert Barchi, and the Board of Governors -- it is now up to you. Do you want to settle for an unproven commodity and lose a large sum of your fanbase and revenue? Or do you want to hire the proven head coach, who's won here before? It's your call.
