Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The First 100 are always key

The first 100 of anything are always key, from the first 100 days of a presidency to the first 100 hits of a major league baseball career. The 100 of any thing is a mark to both savor and both grade out someones performance.

On Saturday, Greg Schiano coached his 100 game as the leader of the Scarlet Nation. At the start of his tenure, few thought that he would see this day but now that he has lets grade the leader on his performance of the last nine seasons.

A 100 games in charge, wow after his first four season, in which he won a grand total of 12 game, few people thought that he would make it. The first four years of his career at the State University of New Jersey featured some embarrassing moments including dropping games to Villanova and New Hampshire. But the administration decided to stick with him and good thing they did.

Schiano started to get his recruits in during his fifth season the when the Knights went 7-5 and went to the Insight Bowl and loss 45-40 to Arizona State. But things were starting to look up. The next three season, Knights returned to bowl games.

Aside from the success on the field, Schiano has been a success off the field. After flirting with various jobs around the country, Miami and Michigan, Schiano pushed the administration to add on to Rutgers Stadium.

In addition to the stadium, Schiano has also made Rutgers relevant on the recruiting trail. Take the recruiting of New York defensive end Dominique Easley. Sure Easley selected Penn State, but Rutgers was in it to the end with programs such as Florida and Georgia. Take a look at the top 50 high school players from the region and you will see that Rutgers has been involved with most of them till the end. Under Schiano, Rutgers has been able to make inroads in places that they have never been able to like South Carolina. In the 2010 class Rutgers signed Chas Dodd a quarterback at the famed Byrnes High School in South Carolina. Imagine back about five years, the thought of a player coming to Rutgers from South Carolina was out of the question, now it has become a reality.

While Schiano has a 48-52 record during his tenure and has been a pain to the media, he goes down as the great coach in the history of the school. As for a letter grade, OTWT would have to give him an A, if he would have taken Rutgers to BCS Bowl then he would have gotten the plus. To take a program from where he got to now deserves all of the credit in the world.

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