Greg Schiano pledged his future to Rutgers football, with the head coach making official on Wednesday a new long-term contract. The deal will extend Schiano through the 2030 season, giving Rutgers more stability at the top of the program.
The new contract for Schiano also signals the end of a significant stage in this 2.0 era of his return to Rutgers. The rebuild is officially over.
It isn’t to say that Rutgers has arrived and now will be competing with the elite programs of the Big Ten. But in going 6-6 this past season and tying the program’s best Big Ten record, Schiano proved in year four of his rebuild that the program has found a place of stability.
Schiano, the only man in recent history to ever truly find success at Rutgers, is forever intertwined with the development of the Scarlet Knights into a true Power Five program. Schiano, in so many ways, is the embodiment of the program.
That’s because before Schiano first came to Rutgers in 2001, there truly was no program. Sure, Rutgers tinkered and toyed with big-time college football. But it was a board game, lacking all the seriousness needed to compete at this high level.
In 2001, he undertook the painful task for which he was uniquely built. This Jersey boy, for whom football was no board game, was called with a seeming zeal to build every fiber within this program. Again in 2020, Schiano was charged with a similar task, this time to clean up the ruins of a program he once had created with a master craftsman’s precision.
As he is often known to relate, Rutgers is a developmental program by his design. In this era of the transfer portal and NIL, Rutgers won’t be able to compete with the blueblood programs of college football. But with a coaching staff of teachers and his own meticulous methods, Schiano has said for the previous three years that it was a matter of time until his program began to flow with talent.
It wouldn’t be the kind of talent that say Ohio State gets, what with their giant shadow in recruiting. But it would be talent that could be molded and shaped after a couple of seasons in the program.
That’s where Schiano is now with Rutgers.
In proving to be more flexible and adaptable, Schiano 2.0 and the rebuilding project are on very much the same pace as his first tenure with the program. That he is finding this similar level of success in the Big Ten and in the toughest division in college football is simply something that can’t be understated in terms of its difficulty.
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Rutgers had the second-toughest schedule in the nation last season. To go 6-6 with a roster that is still developing and growing is one of the best coaching jobs in college football this season.
It won’t get that buzz but make no mistake about it, this has been an incredible job by Schiano and his staff to turn Rutgers from a punching bag into a contender.
And that leads us to today’s news and what it means for Rutgers. In the broadest sense, an extension for Schiano is a sign that Rutgers won’t be going back to the dark days of the ash heap. There is likely to be a rough season or maybe two in the next seven years of Schiano’s stay with the program. That is inevitable and part of the competitive nature of the college football world.
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But the days of painstaking rebuilding are done and over. Now, the program looks to add anew each year to the foundation that was put in place over the past three years.
Schiano is here to stay. And so too is Rutgers football.
Scroll down and check out the best photos of Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano from this past season!