by Mike Pavlichko
The Rutgers football team was one of just two in the Big Ten to play all nine games available to it in the regular season, playing them in consecutive weeks, a feat never before accomplished. (And probably for good reason.)
The Scarlet Knights won three of those games, but were competitive in nearly all of them, an achievement that – for many fans who suffered five abysmal seasons under Chris Ash, who was an abysmal 8-32 that probably wasn’t even as good as that record would indicate – was nothing short of miraculous.
Greg Schiano, ever the head coach, was asked at his season-ending press conference Monday whether he thought that put his program “ahead of schedule” from where he thought it would be in 2020 when he took the job a little over a year ago.
“There’s people who who want to say ‘Oh, we could have been 6-3,'” said Schiano, who added, “We also could have been 1-8, or 0-9. Those are all close games. You won some, you lost some.”
“I always think you could do this better, this better, this better and won every game, but that’s a coach’s look and sometimes that’s not realistic either.”
But Schiano says he’s certainly “encouraged” by what Rutgers was able to do on the whole over the past 12 months and a couple of weeks.
“We established our culture. We established how hard it is to do what we want to do,” said Schiano.
Listen to Schiano’s full end-of-season comments below: