Tuesday, the Big Ten Conference announced that it was cancelling all athletic competition for the fall.
Speaking for the first time since the decision, Rutgers football head coach Greg Schiano met the media and talked about his reaction to the postponement of the 2020 season.
"All along you kind of see the ebbs and flows and I tried not to speculate because I think the one thing is this virus has taught us a lot of things. There’s been a lot of great teaching moments for our football team, for our coaching staff, and for yours truly. It really reinforced my belief in it," Schiano said Friday. "To speculate is a waste of time because this thing was day to day. If you would have said to me right before we had the outbreak, we had four positive tests in six weeks, we were doing a really, really good job as a program. The guys were going along,(Jay Butler) was training them and they were doing the things with the protocols needed, but we were getting stronger and we were getting faster. It was much like a real productive summer and then it was like getting hit with a two by four when all the cases happened. I didn't really speculate where it was going so when it happened, it wasn't a surprise or not a surprise. We had alternative plans in place and literally when I got the final it's postponed, I was sitting with JB in my office. (We were saying) OK, if it gets pushed back to the 26th, let's start talking scenarios. If it gets pushed back to 26th, how are we going to train this team? It gets complicated when you're moving the start date and how you physically handle your team right because. What got all the attention was over the course of the summer the 30 some odd positives, but you got to remember that left us with 100 negatives guys that are training. How long can they keep it up at the level you want it to keep it up? So Jay and I were meeting on that when I got the word and I literally hung up the phone and I said OK forget the 26th, we’re gonna talk about what we are going to do going forward when we get everybody back. When I say it's day to day and we just need to have contingency plans. That's what I spent most of my time doing this summer is dealing with the here and now and developing contingency plan so if that struck, that we had a direction and it wasn't trying to figure everything out at 11 p.m. at night.
"So, I think our staff is dealing with it as well as they can. I talk to our players all the time about the fact that you don't control what happens to you in life. I mean, I do think there's some parts that you can have an input on, but there's going to be adversity that comes your way that no matter what you do. And now the question is how do you handle it. And I thought our guys handled it very well. I think our staff handled it well, and you gotta remember, there's a ritual to starting training camp. As a football player you do a couple things before you start training camp. If you have a girlfriend, you go see your girl. You have dinner with your family and get some snacks ready for the room and some stuff, and then you head off to camp with your duffel bag and then it's a mindset. We never were able to get that mindset, because we had to quarantine our team well before training camp so now they're in quarantine and they can't do those things. I felt awful. I really did feel bad for the players. My hat's off to them because they just kept chopping through it and they didn't moan and groan. This is the hand we were dealt. I thought coaches did a good job of continually explaining to them this is a life lesson right because it's going to happen. You're going to get dealt cards in life. Too bad you got the five of clubs. Figure out a plan. And I thought our guys did a good job with that. It’s where we are.”
With the postponement by the league, the Big Ten will try to have the season, whatever that will look like, in 2021.
"Again, I'm really not gonna get into speculating spring or winter," Schiano told TKR. "When they know when we're going to play for sure, I'm going to set our team's mindset on that. Until then we're going to train. Our guys are coming back at the end of the month. We're going to get back to it and. back to work. They start school. And we'll just take it day by day. There's certain things that I know we can do whenever the season starts that are appropriate, and there's other things that we'll have to ramp up once we know when the season starts. That's what we kept trying to do even in these scenarios. The start date was a moving target, and we just had to have enough contingency plans that when we knew the day we could make the move. We'll continue to do that."
Currently, the Scarlet Knights are back home until the end of the month when they report back for 20 hours of practice. The players will also have online school work. Health wise, Schiano said about 30 members contracted COVID-19 and two are still in quarantine, though they should be off "soon".
"They're all doing well. We have two guys that are left in their quarantine. They finished that soon. We've done everything we can adequately to make sure that they're safe and they all seem to be feeling well," Schiano said. "Of those 30, probably half of them were asymptomatic. They never felt anything. They just tested positive. The other half felt symptoms and that's a hard line to say. I don't think we had anybody that was super extreme. I think that the worst of our guys had a pretty bad flu, sweating through the sheets, that kind of stuff. Certainly other issues are checked by our medical staff.
“I’m confident we’re doing well medically. We do a full cardiac workup on those guys when they test positive. That is a lengthy process. ...But the virus is still very strong and still prevalent in our state and we just have to do a great job of containing it when we do get back together."
Stay tuned for more from TKR. Follow Chris Nalwasky on Twitter @ChrisWasky
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