As Greg Schiano heads into his fourth season back, the Rutgers football head coach believes that the rebuilding of his program is beginning to bear fruit.
It was his fifth season at Rutgers football during his original tenure that Schiano saw a dramatic step forward. That 2005 season, Rutgers went 7-5 and made a bowl game for the second time in program history.
By the next season, Rutgers was a ranked team and would make five bowl games in their next six seasons. In answering a question from Dave Wannstedt during an appearance on the Big Ten Network this week, Schiano said that ‘we’re close’ when asked if his program is ready to take a step forward.
“Is it going to be this year that’s the breakout year or a year from now?” Schiano told the Big Ten Network on Thursday
“We’re a developmental program, as you know, right? So we’re going to bring in really quality people, quality players, maybe they need to put on 40-50 pounds, or maybe we just got to work on them a little bit because they haven’t played in a real intricate high school system.”
A big point of focus for Schiano since his arrival was upgrading the strength and conditioning program. The return of Jay Butler to the program was hailed by Schiano as instrumental for his vision of the rebuild.
Butler, the director of sports performance, has a track record that includes time spent in the NFL.
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Last fall, Schiano told WFAN that his program was going to be “developmental” in its mentality, his point underscoring the importance of recruiting coachable players and get them into the system.
“But we’re going to develop them in the strength and conditioning area, we’re going to develop as football players, we’re going to develop them as men. And it usually takes two and a half three years before they really start hitting on all cylinders,” Schiano said.
“But I feel like we’re close. You know, I tell our people that the pipeline is about three quarters of the way full. And you know, this ’24 class we get in here next year, – that’ll really fill the pipeline and then what’s happened in our system is once it starts coming out the other end of the pipeline, it just keeps flowing.
“And that’s what we got to do. We got to get that thing full. Here. We got some really good players that are now 21 or 22 years old, which is a lot different than being a good player at 18 or 19 years old. To win in the Big Ten you need men. And I think that we’re getting to that stage where our best players are actually becoming men.”
Schiano’s team will conclude their offseason practice schedule this weekend with the annual ‘Spring Game’ on Saturday at 3 PM.
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