In the Win Column

There used to be a time for Rutgers football when a 25-point loss at home was the highlight of the season. In fact, this time was not that long ago, and I remember it well. It was a blustery early November afternoon and we were sitting in the upper deck of an unusually packed Rutgers Stadium as the Scarlet Knights led the No. 1 ranked Miami Hurricanes 17-14.

I say unusually packed because in those days the stands were typically barren on most Saturdays, with the school desperately giving out tickets to anyone who would fill the seats, to anyone who would even pretend to be interested in a football program that was mightily struggling.

But on that afternoon, midway through the second season of coach Greg Schiano’s tenure, there was a brief glimpse of the hope that Rutgers saw when they hired him away from the very school they were beating that day. Although the Hurricanes would rattle off 28 unanswered points and win the game 42-17, and although Rutgers would finish the season a dismal 1-11, that game and that brief 3-point lead was enough to knock Miami out of their No. 1 ranking for at least one week, and it was certainly enough to restore just a glimmer of hope in a football program that had long been an afterthought in New Jersey sports.

During his 10 years as head coach of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, Greg Schiano restored pride in a school and a football program that desperately needed it. The “Birthplace of College Football” could once again proudly declare itself as such without receiving the harsh ridicule that had come to be associated with the scarlet “R” during the 1980′s and 1990′s. To put it plainly, he rebuilt Rutgers football from the ground up, turning it from a rusty and wind-beaten shack on the banks of the Raritan into the proud, gleaming behemoth that it is today (complete with 12,000 new seats and a shiny new jumbotron).

When I arrived at the university in 2005 as a student, I brought with me the hopes that I would one day get to sit in Rutgers Stadium with my fellow students and cheer for a winning football team, a team that I could be proud of, and a team that packed the seats with a sea of Scarlet red and regularly played games on ESPN. The team was coming off of a 4-7 season before I began my freshman year on the banks, and I figured my dream of watching a contender was possible, but still far off.

Boy, was I wrong.

That 2005 season saw Rutgers play in its first bowl game in over two decades, and although we lost, it was certainly a sign of things to come. Little did I know that less than 12 months later, I would be witnessing the game that would put Rutgers football on the map for good and become one of the most exciting moments in the history of the school and the state of New Jersey.

That warm November night in 2006 was when Rutgers football officially went from pretender to contender. No longer was a 25-point loss to a Top 5 team considered a high point. No, we wanted more than that. We wanted to taste victory, we wanted to rush the field, to soak in the beauty of college football relevance, to watch our team lead off that night’s edition of SportsCenter. By erasing a 25-7 deficit and knocking off No. 3 Louisville to remain unbeaten, we got just that.

That week, Rutgers would rise to the highest BCS ranking in school history, at No. 6, and it seemed surreal. In a span of only 5 years, Greg Schiano turned Rutgers football from the laughingstock of the Big East into a legitimate BCS contender, and he did it with a roster loaded with future NFL talent like Ray Rice, Brian Leonard, Kenny Britt, Devin McCourty, Tiquan Underwood and Anthony Davis. No longer was the school begging people to fill the seats of Rutgers Stadium — now they had to build more seats just to fit everyone who wanted to be there, who wanted to witness this transformation. In fact, in my 4 years at Rutgers, I went from easily being able to get free tickets to games to having to enter a lottery just for the chance to get tickets. By my senior year, students had to pay to get in. Crazy, huh?

After receiving five different Coach of the Year awards for his stellar 2006 season, the offers began rolling in for prestigious coaching jobs all over the nation. Miami, Notre Dame, Michigan, you name the vacant head coaching position and chances are that Schiano was offered the job — and turned it down. Born and raised in the state of New Jersey, Schiano was a Jersey boy all the way through. He had helped to resurrect this downtrodden football program and now he was going to stick around and watch it flourish. Or so we had thought.

Less than a month ago, Rutgers defeated Iowa State in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium to pick up its school-record 5th consecutive bowl win, which is now the longest active streak in the nation. With 8 wins or more in five of the last six seasons and two second place finishes in the Big East, Rutgers is now a school that attracts top high school recruits, instead of scaring them away. Just last season, we landed Savon Huggins, one of the top running backs in the nation in high school. What state was he from? New Jersey. In the past, top New Jersey high school players would typically have shunned Rutgers to attend Penn State or Pittsburgh or West Virginia. Now, we had enough clout to snag this in-state talent we so sorely needed.

The 2011 Rutgers football team exceeded most preseason expectations by finishing 9-4. With a young, mostly inexperienced team filled with underclassmen, the fact that this year’s Scarlet Knight squad was able to scratch together 8 regular season wins and an impressive bowl victory over a Big XII school was a big accomplishment and a reason to have hope for the next few years, especially after a disappointing 2010 campaign. With letters of intent being signed next week, Rutgers was gearing up for another successful offseason of recruiting until a bomb was dropped around noon yesterday.

Nobody saw this coming, not even people closely connected to Schiano inside the Rutgers football organization. There had not been a single word uttered about Schiano being considered for an NFL head coaching position until the rumor slipped out yesterday morning and quickly evolved into a full-fledged story.

Schiano was out.

Just like that, after 10 years of building a program, a stadium, a community and salvaging a long-forgotten fanbase, the Greg Schiano era was over. He is headed to Tampa Bay, to the NFL, where many college coaches have tried and failed before him. Nick Saban, Steve Spurrier, Butch Davis, Bobby Petrino, Dennis Erickson, Lane Kiffin, and the list goes on. It’s not an easy adjustment to make, especially when the pressure is on you from a fanbase that won’t accept a period of rebuilding. The NFL is not like college football, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.

You see, here at Rutgers we were used to decades of losing. When Schiano came in before the 2001 season we weren’t expecting a quick turnaround, or even a turnaround at all. Things like that don’t happen overnight in college football. You need recruits, and you need time. In the NFL, things move much faster. The Buccaneers won their division just a few years ago and have a Super Bowl title. Their fans pay a lot of money for tickets and aren’t going to wait around 4 years for Schiano to rebuild. They want to win, and they want to win now.

Will Schiano be just another college coach who fails in the NFL? Will he long to be on the sidelines of High Point Solutions Stadium next October when the Bucs start the season 2-5 and the fans start getting antsy? Only time will tell.

Of course there are college coaches who have succeeded in the NFL too — Jim Harbaugh is a recent one that comes to mind, and Pete Carroll isn’t doing a bad job in Seattle right now, given the scarce amount of talent he was handed. So there’s hope for Schiano in South Florida.

But what about here at Rutgers? I’m not going to pretend that I’m okay with Schiano leaving the way he did, right before one of the biggest weeks of the year for recruitment. I’m not going to pretend I’m happy with his decision to leave after all he’s done for the program. But I won’t be bitter either. I recognize what he did for Rutgers football, and I thank him for that. Without him, we might still be celebrating 7-6 victories over the University of Richmond instead of scanning the weekly AP rankings to see if Rutgers has cracked the Top 25. The Top 25 was a distant and impossible dream when he arrived in Piscataway, and he made it a reality in only five years.

For that, we will thank him, and wish him the best of luck in Tampa Bay. Just as long as they aren’t playing the Giants.