PISCATAWAY – The mandate for Rutgers football is so simple now it barely bears repeating. how many ways can you say, “It’s time to win a big East title?”
With Greg Schiano entering his 10th season as coach, the impatience for clearing that elusive hurdle has heightened considerably.
After Thursday night’s season opener, optimism might have gone crashing to the ground.
Rutgers certainly didn’t look like a championship team, finally pulling away in the second half for a 31-0 win over Norfolk State, a Division I-AA team out of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.
Dreams of an end-to-end dominating night were lost as the Scarlet Knights missed tackles, missed field goals, and led only 6-0 at halftime thanks to a gift of a last-second field goal, when a second was put back on an apparently expired clock. The ugly win against what should have been an overmatched opponent revealed some real concern whether this is the team that can finally break through that conference championship ceiling.
Schiano put the emphasis on his team’s lack of panic in the face of another, now trademark, slow start, calling the win “a great learning experience for our guys. when you learn and you win, that’s good. That’s what we did.” while admitting, “It wasn’t pretty,” Schiano believes he saw calm resilience. “A lot of young teams would have run for the hills,” he said. “They didn’t do that. They kept working.”
Yet there was an obvious disjointedness on offense, a lack of explosiveness from QB Tom Savage and WR Mohamed Sanu that made it impossible to use this game as a gauge for what this team might become. The next game against Florida International isn’t likely to help either, but by the time Rutgers hosts North Carolina on Sept. 25 and opens the big East schedule with Connecticut on Oct. 8, the learning curve opens wide.
“We’re going to be a better team in November than we are in September,” Schiano said. “I hope what we grow here in September is good enough.”
Schiano was asked specifically this week if he believes this team is good enough to win the conference, and he insisted, “We never talk about that. I think this team is capable of a lot of things. I think it is going to be a matter of how we respond when the lights come on.”
Thursday’s game was enough of a dud to sound some alarm, but there was a time, not so long ago, that a Rutgers team was a slow-moving train that picked up steam. This was the magical 2006 season, the one fondly remembered for thrusting long-forsaken Rutgers into the national spotlight but ruefully recalled for a heartbreaking what-if ending.
Mike Teel can still hear the crowd, still feel the cold, still recall every play of the night that nearly changed Rutgers football forever. nearly four years have passed since December 2006, when Rutgers came within a dropped pass of a BCS bid, a subfreezing night in West Virginia that feels like a football lifetime ago. Remember the home upset of then-No. 3 Louisville, the red-tinted Empire State Building and the climb into the top 10 of the national polls?
Rutgers hasn’t been back to that stratosphere since.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Teel insisted in a phone conversation this week. “I know people have been saying that for years, but just think to 10 years ago and remember where it was, and believe it.”
How different the landscape would look if Teel and Co. could have pulled out a win that December night. The one-loss team headed down to face longtime nemesis West Virginia in a regular-season finale with the highest stakes. Win, and go the BCS bowl as the big East champs. Lose, and take a second-tier bid. at the time, both options seemed great, as Rutgers had yet to win a postseason game.
Rutgers lost, 41-39, in triple overtime, a painful defeat that included the infamous end zone drop by James Townsend. a resounding win in the ensuing Texas Bowl eased the pain, but it was temporary relief. who knew Rutgers would not get that close again, not in Teel’s final two years as a starting quarterback, not behind the NFL-bound rushes of Ray Rice, not under the guidance of the coach who rebuilt the program?
“When I think about the West Virginia game and I remember we would have had gotten the chance to play in the Orange Bowl, and that would have been the high point of my time at Rutgers,” Teel said. “But I don’t have any regrets, and no one on that team had any regrets — we left everything on the field. The whole atmosphere was everything you could ask for in college football.”
Will the season that opened Thursday be different? if Rutgers has learned anything, it is the cruel reality that past success guarantees nothing. if you don’t take advantage when you get there, you might not get another shot. Rutgers hasn’t sniffed a league title since 2006, and another slow start isn’t going to instill confidence that this year is different.
Rutgers hit a low point in 2006, too, losing at Cincinnati the week after the Louisville upset.
“I didn’t play well. The team didn’t play well. we got blown out,” Teel said. “I remember going out for the last series, and we just knelt because they were going to rush the field. Walking off the field, Brian Leonard said to me, “We’ve still got a couple of football games to win.”
Rutgers was lucky that the 2006 season broke the right way to make that last game count for so much. They almost cashed in, but that memory seems so long ago. They’ve been going in the wrong direction ever since.
E-mail: sullivan[at]northjersey.com
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090310_Sullivan: Rutgers don’t look like a title team in opener