He was a middler long before "NIL" became a factor, and his long head-coaching record bears that out. Look, he is a master at taking an absolute bottom-feeder and making it into a respectable program that looks like it at least belongs where it is. Him taking what he inherited at Rutgers in 2000, which was for all intents and purposes a 1-AA-level program, and building the infrastructure and creating a brand, was the model. And even though the infrastructure was in place when he was rehired in 2019, he still had to undo the damage wrought by Ash's breathtaking incompetence.
But aside from that 2006 season, which is clearly an outlier, he's not the kind of guy who can make a good team very good, let alone great. Aside from "NIL," he's also got the added disadvantage of not being able to pad the overall record with five creampuff nonconference games anymore, like he was always able to do in the Big East. He's only got room for three. And his conference records have always been mediocre. People love to extend him grace because of the hit those records took from when he was rebuilding, but if you start counting from the week after that huge win over Louisville in 2006, he was just 17-21 in his remaining Big East conference games before he bolted for Tampa Bay. That, after achieving what was, by a huge margin, his high-water mark. It was built. He had visibility. He had players. He just isn't that kind of coach. So he can finger point at "NIL" (which certainly is not his friend), and keep scapegoating offensive coordinators every year, but the record over almost 25 years is that he is just not a very good head coach. He's not terrible (although I would say that 2024 Greg Schiano is not the factor that 2005 Greg Schiano was; he's been left behind to a large extent), but he's a classic middler. Only at Rutgers, which for the last forty years has only ever hired terrible head coaches or him, does he look like a miracle worker, or represent some sort of "no one else could do any better." They would be fine if they could just get out of their own way.
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