giant110 wrote: Even though I used to live in NJ I am no Rutgers or Coach Schiano fan. I do think Schiano is a MUCH better Coach then RE has been or ever will be.
Schiano was able to get a bunch of good players not only to stay in NJ and play at Rutgers but he got a bunch to come from Florida (where Schiano had coached before) to Rutgers. Even with the much higher standards to get into WP I feel Schiano would have had better results at WP by year 4 then RE has had. Overall the Rutgers schedule has been much tougher as a whole then the schedule Army has played as a whole the last 4 years.
Also lost in this is the fact that there is no way even if RE was half as good at bringing in good HS players as Schiano was that he(RE) would be able to get players half as good talent wise as Schiano could get at Rutgers knowing the standards anyone needs to attend WP. Not a excuse at all for RE as coaches at Navy and Air Force have all had winning records year after year .
I would love to be made to look like a fool with Army finishing over .500 in 2013 but I just do not see that with the same people running the show . I see anyplace form 0 to 4 wins tops in 2013 sadly. I sure hope I am wrong but nothing points to any hope that things will change.
Having done my graduate work at Rutgers, sent two sons to Rutgers, and lived 30+ years in NJ, Rutgers has been my second Alma Mater for most of my life, and I had a chance to watch the evolution of Rutgers football with more than passing interest, and I'm a pretty big fan of Schiano.
As Giant points out, it's unfair to compare Schiano with RE when it comes to recruiting. Rutgers fans were convinced for a long time that the key to success was keeping the best NJ players at home. As the official state university and only FBS level program in the state, Rutgers should have had a significant advantage in attracting the best NJ high school players, but RU fans found themselves cringing when the announcers identified top quality players from NJ appearing in bowl games for other teams. While NJ may not have as many talented football recruits as Texas, Florida, or California, it is the 8th largest state in terms of population with a reasonable share of good football programs, and Rutgers is the only FBS team in the state. The recruiting problem at RU was not limited to football. Students from NJ, in general, undervalued Rutgers as a university, and thought it was more prestigious to attend Michigan or Ohio State than to matriculate at their home university. Oddly enough, students from out of state were far more impressed with Rutgers and were only too happy to be admitted, and my son tells me that the people in Texas are far more impressed with his degree from Rutgers than the people he grew up with in NJ.
The primary key to Schiano's success was building a solid network with NJ high school coaches and convincing more of the blue chip athletes to stay home. Rutgers has always thought of itself as quasi-Ivy League; so they do pay more attention to entrance standards than some state schools, even for their athletes, but probably not anywhere close to approaching the requirements for WP.
Army has to recruit from a much broader geographical base, national rather than regional, which is a far more difficult task to start with. Add to that the physical and academic standards and the service commitment, and there's no way one can compare the task of recruiting at any of the SAs to that of recruiting for a major state university. I expect to see Rutgers recruiting improve even more now that they've joined the Big Ten and can bring teams like Penn State, Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio State to play regularly. There are enough graduates from those schools living in the local area to fill up the empty seats in the stadium and attract young high school kids to the games, and the prestige of playing in the Big Ten versus the Big East will have a significant impact. I fully expect them to start pulling in their fair share of 4 and 5 star talent, especially from the local NJ area. I suspect they'll also pull more players from Eastern PA that might have gone to Temple or Penn State.
It's purely speculative to argue that Schiano would have been signficantly more successful at WP his first four years. He's a good, dynamic coach with the kind of fire that many of the fans on this forum find lacking in RE, but there's no reason to believe that his approach would have had any more effective at WP than at RU or than REs was at WP. Schiano's ultimate success was due more to bringing in athletes like Ray Rice and a few others who have gone on to play in the pros than it was to any particular coaching genius. The fact that the program has continued to produce at the same level under a new coach is evidence of that. Even in his early years, Rutgers attracted better athletes than what we are able to bring in and he was not able to magically win games on his coaching prowess alone. By WP standards, Josh McNary and Steve Anderson were outstanding players, but we often forget that McNary was not recruited by any FBS level schools out of high school. Ellerson found a way to win with those guys in 2010. Unlike a lot of people on the forum, I have no problem with the card system, but I have had some concerns about some of Ellerson's decisions, but he did demonstrate that he could win in 2010 with a decent group of seniors; so I'm waiting to see what he can do with a more experienced squad this coming season.
I am generally in agreement with JimBeam regarding the quality of recruits that RE has brought in the past few years compared to those brought in by Brock. Calhoun and KN both inherited programs with relatively well developed recruiting programs and staffs that were fully familiar with SA requirements, and IMHO, RE and staff have closed the gap on them in recent years. This year will be the first time the RE is playing with seniors he brought in (Mackey is not one of them by the way), and though even that initial recruiting class was depleted somewhat, he is now playing with his guys and should be expected to produce. I don't know too many coaches who win with teams dominated by freshmen and sophomores; so this is the year is the real test of what he can do with his own guys. Next year's juniors are the core of the team and most of them now have at least one solid year of playing experience and several have close to two full years under their belts. Likewise, guys like Meier, Altimalala, Schurr, Carnegie, and Jefferies will no longer be balancing the rigors of plebe year with the challenge of playing D1 level football. They're still very young, but they have more experience and a good crop of juniors and a smattering of seniors to lead them.
It's pointless to draw comparisons between the seniors from the 2010 team and the yearlings and plebes from the past season; so I won't go into that. Freshmen and sophomores should not be able to play at the same level as seniors, even when they have had a little more experience than normal. This is the year to draw true comparisons between REs guys and those of previous coaches.
Coaching at a Service Academy is fundamentally different than coaching at any other FBS program, and I don't think you can make valid comparisons or argue that successful coaches from the football factories would necessarily do well at any of the SAs. I doubt seriously that Nick Saban would consider coaching at Army no matter how much they paid him. Comparing BCS coaches with SA coaches is like comparing success in college to success in the NFL. A large part of a coach's success at college level is based on ability to recruit, but the NFL draft tends to have an equalizing effect on that aspect of coaching. Some coaches only do well at college level, while others prove to be better in the NFL. Bill Parcels was considered one of the worst coaches that AFA ever had by most of their fans, and he was at least somewhat familiar with SA football. Bobby Ross was pretty successful in both the NCAA and NFL and the unusual demands of coaching at WP were too much for him. There's a lot more to the job than X's and O's.
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