Rutgers football head coach Greg Schiano has full confidence in offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson, even after the Scarlet Knights had some struggles over the weekend. In Saturday’s 16-14 win at Temple, Rutgers didn’t score an offensive touchdown.
And it led to some pretty angry fans, many of whom were discouraged about Gleeson’s offense. Gleeson is now in his third season as offensive coordinator at Rutgers.
On offense, Rutgers was stale on Saturday against Temple. The Scarlet Knights had just 12 first downs and 201 yards of total offense.
The showing was a surprise as the Rutgers offense has been improved this season. Two weeks ago in the season opener at Boston College, the offense and in particular the offensive line, simply wore down their ACC opponent.
And in their home opener the following weekend against Wagner, Rutgers was efficient and simply overpowered their opposition.
[lawrence-related id=18972]
When asked on Monday about Gleeson and his confidence level in the offensive coordinator, Schiano left zero wiggle room on where things stand.
“As high as it could be. Yeah, we got the right guy to be our offensive coordinator,” Schiano told reporters.
Given a relatively solid output through their first two games, it was a bit surprising to see Rutgers struggle to move the ball against an opponent that gave up 30 points in their season opener to Duke. In fact, it led to considerable angst from a portion of the fanbase about Gleeson.
[lawrence-related id=18983]
A lot of the issues were self-inflicted as Rutgers had nine penalties for 80 yards. Playcalling seemed an issue as did the fact that the wide receivers got very little separation down the field.
To their credit in the fourth quarter, Rutgers churned out two drives that ate up significant clock, the first being 12-plays that went 35 yards for 7:54 followed by six plays for 33 yards and 2:25 to kill off the game. Neither drive ended in points, but both showed that Rutgers could move the ball.
[lawrence-related id=18923]
Gleeson, if he is going to shoulder the blame for the struggles in the first three quarters, deserves full credit for helping Rutgers to hold onto the lead with those two drives.
“I think some things happened that were part of it was technical. Part of it was schematic,” Schiano said when asked about where to better the offense.
“And when I say ‘technical’ I mean technique. And part of it was cultural so throw all three things together, and you had kind of a perfect storm. But we are moving. We are learning from it and we are moving forward and we need to because we have an opponent with as stout a defense as there in the country.”
[mm-video type=playlist id=01fc3gzhz7qrm49z6q player_id=none image=https://rutgerswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]