Everything Rutgers Football HC Greg Schiano said ahead of Illinois game week
Rutgers Football head coach Greg Schiano met with the media again today as the Scarlet Knights prep for the upcoming game against the Illinois Fighting Illini this upcoming Saturday afternoon inside of Memorial Stadium.
Full Press Conference Transcript Coming Soon
Guys, thanks for coming out, and thanks for working with us here on this change. Change of venue, change of day. This is gonna be what it’ll be for a little bit. But just got off the field, good practice, guys very focused. I think they know exactly what we’re walking into, a very, very good Illinois team, and I saw they announced the sellout, so it’ll be a great environment. Great challenge.
Look, I think offensively their quarterback is a special player, right? I mean, we saw him last year. He can make every throw, his arm, he can do it from every arm angle. He’s athletic, he extends plays, he creates plays. He really is a fine quarterback, an experienced quarterback. He doesn’t make many mistakes. They have a very good running back room.
Number three is 255 pounds, five and 21 is a really good back. So they have three really good backs. Their whole line is experienced, big, very big, very experienced, nasty, and then the receiving court.
He’s really burst onto the scene now. I mean, he’s something, they have a group of receivers that have a really good mix, very much like ours. They have big guys, they have quick guys, they have fast guys, they have everything.
So I think there’s a reason that athletically and numerically the numbers they have offensively, it’s not by accident. Very, very talented. Defensively, 17 coming off the edge, he gave us problems.
He’s kind of a game wrecker. Their linebacker is a very good player, I think it’s 28, am I right, 28? I think it’s 28, yeah. He is really, really athletic. I mean, he’s got something like nine or ten or 12 career takeaways. I mean, he is a ball hawk. We have to be very, very secure with the football. And then the secondary is an experienced group. So I think that they’ve had some injuries back there, but they still have some guys that have played a lot of football. So we’re gonna have to really be on point in every area of the game, cuz special teams, they create issues as well.
So it’s definitely a challenge, one that I know our team’s excited about. That’s why you play in the Big Ten, to go play in games like this, and we’re looking forward to it. So with that, I’ll open it up.
We need to ask you this after the game. And I know you don’t like talking about injuries, but Al-Shadee and Taj White seem to really get dinged up really bad. What are the odds that they’re coming back at this point in the season with four games left?
GREG SCHIANO: “Yeah, you’re right, I’m not gonna talk about injuries via the availability report.
But the thing, you guys get the availability reports, as I do. We had 22 guys that ended up being out of the game. Can you imagine if the 105 rule was in effect? I hope that we amend that rule because it’d be hard to practice college football.
People always say, well, the NFL does it with, well, first of all, the NFL, they are the best players on the planet. They don’t need to be developed. We get guys that are high school football players that have to be developed, especially in a place like ours.
We have a developmental program. So how do you practice when you can’t run two fields at the same time and practice productively? So we are at the verge of not being able to do that right now with the injuries we’ve had. Some of them are starters, actually quite a few are, but a lot of them are depth players.
Where does that affect you? It affects you in the kicking game. I get frustrated with our kickoff coverage sometimes. But a lot of those guys that should be on that kickoff coverage are out. And that’s not what gets thought of or talked about. So we have to find a way, and I think Eddie Allen, Jake Bahr, they do a great job with our special teams, and they’re working their tail off. We have to be special with our specialists. We have to be able to do those things. So huge challenge, but looking forward to it.
You mentioned after the game on Saturday, some of the changes in roles among the coaching staff for the defense. There’s still some of the issues with guys out of position, things like that. I guess, how are you and the staff remedying that this week against a really good offense?
GREG SCHIANO: “Just continuing to work at it. There’s no magic pill. Just because you change responsibilities or you change, we have to do a better job of violently communicating with each other. There was a couple of situations where we have to coach better, right? We have to get them to do it. That’s your job as a coach.
I never look at it when a player doesn’t perform. I never look at it as the player. I look at it as the coach, and I’m one of those coaches, so I look at it as myself. We recruited them, we developed them. So if they’re not getting it done, it’s on us. We got to find a way to get it done.
Whether you change personnel, whether you change the way you do it, whether you change the way you teach it, the way you say it. You better figure it out, because there’s no waiver wire. You’re not going to get somebody for the last four weeks.
You’re playing with who you brought here, and you gotta coach the heck out of them, and get them to do it the way you want. So that’s what we need to do on defense. We need to do that on all three phases, actually.”
Kind of going hand in hand with that. The defense played a lot better this week, especially the last three quarters. But there were some still misalignments in pre-snaps. Do you blame that more on coaching? Is it more of a players just not understanding the changes, or?
GREG SCHIANO: “Probably a little bit of everything. Like I say to them, we’re all in this together, guys. There’s no us and you, or you and us.
It’s all of us. We win together, we lose together, ODK, all together, right? And when you have struggles, you don’t get there overnight. We’ve played really good defense over the years, and we’ve played not so good defense over the years.
We’ve played them both. How do you get there? You don’t get there overnight. How do you get out of there? You don’t get out of there overnight.
All I’m looking for is incremental improvement. Can we get a little bit better? Today we got a little bit better, so I’m pleased, right? Saturday we got a little bit better from the previous game, I’m pleased. We just got to keep getting better.
Would I like to get better this much instead of this much? Yeah, but as I always say to the team, there’s another team on the other sideline that wants exactly what you want. They wanna win the game. Something gotta give, right? So we gotta be better at making it give our way.
Just touching on the injury situation, defensive back, wide receiver, even offensive tackle, how difficult is it logistically for you just to be able to get through the practices?
GREG SCHIANO: “I know you wanna develop the guys, but to be able to give a good look and everything you kind of need to do in game week. That’s a great question. It’s very hard. And what sacrifices is the developmental portion of it, right? You said even the offensive tackles. I don’t think people realize how many offensive tackles we’ve lost this year. I mean, we are, I don’t know, that’s five, four, fives.
How many do you actually have on your team? So you have to practice. What I love to do is when we’re done with our game prep practice, we always, on Tuesday and Wednesday, we always do developmental. So we do developmental team anywhere from 10 to 20 plays every Tuesday, every Wednesday, every Sunday.
So these guys play an entire game over the course of a week. And if you take that out over the whole year, they really do improve quite a bit. There’s a lot of programs where once the season starts, those guys don’t get any reps at their offense or defense.
All they do is mimic the other team on the scout team. We’ve had to stop doing that because we can’t risk the injury. If we have an injury in our developmental period at the end of practice, then we won’t have enough guys to run the scout team.
So that’s where you get it, it’s a lag effect. It’ll have a lag effect moving forward because we’re no longer able to develop them in our offense, defense, and kicking game. And we’ve done some.
I’m not saying we cut it out totally, but we’ve had to lessen it. And that I don’t like, because I truly believe, and it’s hard as a coach. You get into this part of the season, and you wanna get in and watch the tape, cuz you’re tired.
And eventually, there’s only so many hours in the day. But those developmental periods, to me, are everything. And you gotta, as a coach, gotta suck, cuz we let the guys go that are playing in the game, and then it’s just the developmental guys out there and the coaches. And it’s an extra 10, 15 minutes, but that’s the difference going to bed at midnight or going to bed at 12, 15. Every minute counts at this stage of the year. So I appreciate that our coaches always were willing to sacrifice for the development of the guys.
And I appreciate the players that do a hard job on scout team. And then after we break it down, they go take another 10, 15, 20 plays to get better. So that’s being sacrificed now, which I hate.”
Looking at the bigger picture, you talked about your admiration for Kirk Ferentz when he’s built at Iowa. Is there a similar feeling for Bret Bielema, what he’s been able to do for consistent output now at two Big Ten schools?
GREG SCHIANO: “Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Brett. We go way back, and he’s a darn good football coach. He had a great husband, great father, all the things that are good for a program. And a lot of respect for the whole staff, they’re really good football coaches. And that’s why I love this league. You don’t see anybody in this league that aren’t good coaches. The entire staff, everybody’s a good coach. So it’s great competition.
If you’re a competitor, that’s what you live for, to go against other really talented groups and see how you match up. And as I said earlier, the beauty of competition is the guy on the other side, they want the exact same thing you want. That’s what’s fun.
Especially back on the two years in a row that these things have really piled up. Why, from what you’ve seen, why does this keep happening to this program? Well, I can make stabs at it. I let the sports science people help me with that.
I think we’ve made changes that are going to show positive effects. But I don’t think, everything in life has a lifetime. And I think we will get better. It’s unfortunate, though, two years in a row, you’re right to have the level of injuries we have. You know what? Nobody cares, as I always tell everybody. If you’re looking for somebody to feel sorry for you in the wrong place, including me, I don’t feel sorry for it.
That’s the way it is. I don’t talk about it very much at all because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. You gotta go play with who you’ve got.
That’s what I’ve done my whole career. So we’ll just keep doing that. All right, guys, thank you for coming up. That wasn’t the last one? Two more. My goodness. Wait a minute, didn’t you say two more, two more? No, no, no, two questions each.”
Everyone talks about the defensive changes and personnel changes and all that other stuff, but there were some offensive changes this week, so a lot more gap scheme runs. Do you kind of foresee that being a thing going forward, or is that just more based on what you saw on the opposite side of the field?
GREG SCHIANO: “Yeah, every week, the coach has come up with a plan. That’s what, we do a lot of advanced work. And then you come in on Sunday, you put that game to bed, and then it’s on to the next opponent. And you try to look at it and say, what is there that we’re doing that can be beneficial, and if there’s something we’re not doing, maybe we can do that if it fits. So we have done a couple different things at this point of the year, and we’ll continue to search.
But I think one of the things that we generally do a good job of is sticking to what we know and what we do well, and not getting too out there on the fringe. Because every rep that you do with something new or something that maybe in vogue takes away from a rep of perfecting your technique and your execution. And that’s what we do, whether there’s other ways to do it, certainly there is.
We believe in execution, and that’s what we’re gonna do. So there may be a couple of wrinkles here and there, but nothing that I think will be earth shattering. We’re not going to the triple or anything like that, okay? Thanks, guys.
Wait, there’s one more of you? My goodness, Jimmy, you’re killing me here. This is the last one. All right, I get you. Maybe I’m not into press conference mode, I’m more into post-practice. That’s my final thought, I apologize.
All right, I know you talked a little bit about after the game, but the emotion you showed on the field. I know a lot of people said gut check game for Rutgers and everything else. Why so much for you pounding the fist on the turf?
GREG SCHIANO: “Well, there’s a lot that goes on. If you could imagine being responsible for 250 people, all right? So 250 people all have issues.
And I’m not gonna get into everybody’s issues, but when you love those people like we do in our program, you feel their pain, right? You feel their pain when they lose people, you feel their pain. It was a really tough week around our building, as well as having lost four straight games. I think that was exhaustion and probably really just so happy for the people that have been paying a price and not getting a return on their investment.
Just to have them have a little investment, it was a good feeling. And look, I know my faith, I believe that there’s no coincidences. And I was real thankful that we were able to come away with the W, but that’s in the past.
And everything, as I told the players, we get to celebrate that. And we did, we had fun. But then Sunday, we got on the mistakes, got them corrected. And quickly got on to Illinois, and that’s where we are now. So I look forward to it. Again, I appreciate you covering us. And I’m kidding around, obviously, I did. Anything you need, Jimmy, we’ll do. Again, you guys do a great job. And when I see guys travel all across the country to cover us, I really do appreciate that. I know there’s other ways you could do it, and you choose to do it that way. So it means a lot.
Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.”
The Knight Report joins On3 Sports
With the merge of Rivals and On3 Sports, The Knight Report has joined the On3 family! For those of you that don’t know, On3 is a leading sports media and technology company delivering trusted coverage, data, and connectivity across youth, high school, and college sports.
There’s also no better time to join the premium side of The Knight Report and get access to all the inside scoop on the football team with training camp in full swing, latest recruit scoop, team news and more.
If you are having issues with accessing or logging in to the On3 network or The Knight Report, please email us at [email protected] and we will do our best to help you shortly!
💬 Wondering what other Rutgers fans are saying?
Head to The Round Table and jump into the discussion →
