Rutgers must keep hoping
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When Greg Schiano was not waving his hands and spitting his gravely voice through a bullhorn in the Rutgers practice bubble, he was racing one of his wide receivers to the goal line, matching him step for step.
The coach can still cover 40 yards in a respectable time, but this is one Jersey boy who wasn't born to run. Schiano could have sprinted back to Miami two weeks after he was introduced at Rutgers, and he could have sprinted back to Miami at the close of last season, when the devil on his left shoulder sounded more convincing than the Scarlet Knight on his right.
You know this was a fluke, Greg. Get out while you can, Greg. Rutgers will go back to being Rutgers, Greg.
Schiano's response to the second Miami offer was the same as the first: Thanks, but no thanks.
He said he wants to be the Joe Paterno of Rutgers. He said he wants to be the Coach K of Piscataway.
Paterno. Mike Krzyzewski. Bobby Bowden. Lute Olson. Jim Calhoun. Jim Boeheim. In big-time college sports, only a handful of active coaches have built fiefdoms to last a lifetime.
Schiano can be the first guy to do it in New Jersey. Sure, Pete Carril had his mad scientist's lab in Princeton, but the Tigers couldn't aspire to much more than a first-round showing of "Revenge of the Nerds" in March. Sure, P.J. Carlesimo took Seton Hall to the NCAA final, but he had his eye on the NBA and the Hall was destined to settle back into the Big East pack.
Rutgers isn't a smallish private school, and it's not bound by the shackles the Ivy League puts on the Division I sports machine that has run amok across America's campuses.
So this is New Jersey's one and only shot at fielding a program that approaches the magnitude of, say, Ohio State football. And that shot is colored by a question nobody at Rutgers can answer with any degree of certainty.
Will Greg Schiano of Ramapo High be coaching the Scarlet Knights 10 or 15 years from now?
"I love being in New Jersey where all my family is, love everything about it," Schiano said. "Hopefully that can happen. I'm not na to the fact that you've got to keep winning to do that.
"Everything we do right now is the first time it's ever been done. I've been places where it's not the first, but the fourth or fifth. They're enjoyed, but it's not the same.
Miami, another former employer with national titles in its past.
Rutgers has no history of big-bowl glory. In fact, Rutgers has no history of small-bowl glory, either. Tradition? There's Schiano's charmed 2006 season, the school's distinction of winning the first college football game ever played (over Princeton) in 1869 and a whole lot of fourth-and-longs in between.
So Schiano would be more popular in New Jersey than E-ZPass toll lanes if he won the biggest of BCS bowls.
No. 16 preseason ranking, the soft schedule and the 11-2 season that was one dropped pass away from being an 11-1 season heading into an eight-figure BCS game.
"We had a chance to do something really special last year," Schiano said, "and we did relative to what we'd done before. But we kind of blew it, too. That's what's been on my mind. It takes a hell of a team to get back to 9-0."
A hell of a coach, too.
Out of nowhere, Schiano has the region at his feet. He threw out the first pitch at a Yankee game six months after he turned the Empire State Building an improbable shade of red. He's got a Heisman Trophy candidate, Ray Rice, on a Times Square video board. He's got eight sellouts for eight home games, and he's got an administration ready to expand his stadium, his facilities, his empire.
Schiano's also got a New York City market maxed out on professional teams but offering no major college football to its sports-crazed citizens.
"We're it," Schiano said. "What an area to own: the media capital of the world, the business capital of the world. That's why I believe this is such a great place and a great job. ... There's no reason it has to go backward unless human nature takes over and we get lazy."
Or unless Schiano leaves for another gig.
"I know for a fact Greg goes to work every day with the philosophy that he's going to be there the rest of his life," said William Paterson coach Mike Miello, who coached Schiano in high school and assisted him in the early years at Rutgers.
"But in the business we're in, you never close your door completely to anything that may appear down the road."
So is Greg Schiano's door open or closed?
"People will think what they want to think," Schiano said. "I hope when I tell recruits this is where I want to be that they believe me. Everyone else really doesn't matter."
Schiano won the trust of New Jersey's top high school coaches and prospects -- a group that never believed in Rutgers -- and for good cause. He turned down Miami, and built a house across the street from campus.
He has the square jaw and earnest eyes of a man you're inclined to believe, but coaches have been playing this game for a long time. Schiano might reject any and all major college courtships, but what happens if a BCS bowl bid convinces an NFL owner it's time that the former Bears assistant graduated from Rutgers? What happens if this college football fairy tale convinces the Maras and the Tisches that Schiano's youthful, can-do energy would be the perfect antidote to Tom Coughlin's Ice Age approach?
An eventual jump to the NFL, Miello said, "wouldn't surprise me." Only Schiano doesn't want to talk about Sundays when he's got so much planned for Saturdays.
"Growing up," Schiano said, "Rutgers wasn't the quote, unquote, cool place to go to school. Kids were wearing Penn State, Michigan and Notre Dame gear.
"Now I go into schools and see Rutgers hats, shirts and jackets. That's the beginning stage of what I dreamed and believed could happen here."
So Greg Schiano, son of Wyckoff, is happy enough at his state university to race Tiquan Underwood to the goal line in practice.
Rutgers just needs to keep hoping its Jersey boy wasn't born to run.
The Ian O'Connor Show is every Sunday, 9-10 a.m., on 1050 ESPN Radio.
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