7-8 years wasn't the start of the Greg era. He was there since '00. The difference was by 04-05 things started to change hence by 7-8 year estimate of when things started to click.
I didn't say it was the "start" of the Schiano era.
His recruiting in 04-05 was worse than in the start in terms of "stars." However, that class had a lot of under the radar talent which turned out to be successful.
Greg was notoriously hard to work for, and pretty much the only two stalwarts of the staff were Joe Susan who left to be the HC at Bucknell, and Flood. There wasn't much continuity.
Pretty much taking the entire PITT staff helped out Greg and the recruiting, but there were still a lot of question marks in terms of players they took a chance on and didn't.
I do agree here to a point. I think the players that Greg took on a chance post-Pitt stuff are looking better than the ones he took on before them. A lot of those guys are starting to bust through the depth charts.
The most notorious had to be Ray Graham who pretty much took all his game film to Rutgers and pleaded with the Coaching Staff to give him a look, but they refused.
There were academic issues there with Ray Graham. Also, you are confusing the Ray Graham and the Dion Lewis stories.
Still, I understand your point. With that said, there were more Mo Sanu's than Dion Lewis types.
I think the biggest underlying issue has been Flood and his inability to strike gold with the OL like he did from 05-07. So many wasted recruiting classes on projects that never saw the field or were moved to DL.
Flood was never really responsible for the OL that were recruited to the team in 05-07. Many of those guys were recruited before he got there.
I agree with you that with NJ there is enough talent if you take 3/10 of the Top 10, and a couple Top 5 kids from PA/NY/MD/DE/etc and just fill out the class with 3 stars to be more than competitive. I think the issue wasn't so much the recruiting it was the fact Greg was a really average to poor gameday coach.
I will agree gameday coaching was a bigger issue than recruiting. However, my point is that Greg wasn't heads & shoulders above previous coaches, and certainly isn't someone you should be happy to have as your head coach.
I also vastly disagree with Yaboosh's assessment of Rutgers' place in the football hierarchy.
Texas/Ohio State/FSU
