Rutgers Football HC Greg Schiano's Penn State Postgame Press Conference
Rutgers Football head coach Greg Schiano met with the media following the Scarlet Knights’ game versus Penn State on Saturday afternoon inside of SHI Stadium.
Following the game, Schiano spoke with the media to offer an immediate reaction to his program’s performance and talked about what he saw in the 12th game of the season.
Full Press Conference Transcript
GREG SCHIANO: “Tough loss” probably undersells it a little bit. I feel really, really bad for the players down there in that locker room. They are hurting.
As I told them, right, life is tough. Sometimes you don’t feel like you deserve this or deserve that. It’s not about deserving. It’s about, what are you going to do next? And that’s what I’m faced with; and certainly that’s what a locker room full of players and coaches are faced with; and that’s what the fan base is faced with; and the administration is faced with and all those things.
I know what I’m going to do. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the rest of them are going to do, too.
So I’ll open up for questions.
Q. What do you say to Athan after a moment like that?
GREG SCHIANO: I love him. He’s done incredible things here. Incredible. Think about a couple years, our passing game, think about what he’s been able to accomplish, he’s a 3,000-yard passer. And more importantly just to watch him grow as a leader and grow, it’s hard. It’s really hard. Because he’s the ultimate competitor, and he feels like he let people down. But I told him, “You didn’t let anybody down. You’re the reason we’re in the game at the fourth quarter.”
Q. A lot of back-and-forth, and you always say one play doesn’t define a game. What do you think is the biggest key to not being able to close it out?
GREG SCHIANO: There’s a lot of things, right. You could point to this play or that play. Overall, we didn’t stop the run. When we were able to stop the run and they tell them to third down, we got them. I think we were 1-for-8 but they ran for 300 yards. So, it’s hard. Hard to win football games what you can’t stop the run.
Yet there were times we did. There were times that the guys executed it perfectly. So look, it’s frustrating. It’s been frustrating all year. Just got to get it fixed.
Q. You said you know what you’re going to do. Does that involve making changes to the defensive coach —
GREG SCHIANO: Now is not the time. I was talking in broad strokes. I’m know what I’m going to — tomorrow morning, I’m going to sleep a little bit. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning swinging, fighting, because that’s what we do. That’s what I do. I have a vision for this program, as I have told many people many times, you know what, we’re going to accomplish that vision.
Q. The fourth-and-one call in the final drive when Athan got stopped, were you okay with that call there?
GREG SCHIANO: Oh, yeah. Again, probably said this to you guys a number of times, right. But whether the call works or not doesn’t mean it’s a good call, right. Sometimes there’s tremendous athletic performance that stops it. Sometimes there’s a schematic that stops it.
But if you’ve never called plays, it’s hard to understand. You have about 12 seconds to make a decision, and you know, you do it with all the information you have. I mean, there was a lot of great calls tonight, a lot of great plays tonight. Some bad ones, too.
That was a heck of a football game, if you didn’t lose it. It was a tremendous game to be a part of. But when you lose, it hurts.
Q. You mentioned you have a vision for this program. What does that vision entail?
GREG SCHIANO: I’ve said it many times, is to bring championships to Rutgers, to bring Big Ten Championships to Rutgers and to bring National Championships to Rutgers. I don’t believe there’s any reason we can’t do that here. I’ve been saying that since 2000. Someone said, Oh, you’ve been saying it for 25 years. Sometimes you have to look where you started and where you restarted.
But if somebody is crazy enough to keep doing it, well, who knows, maybe we’ll just get there.
Q. The performance of Antwan Raymond tonight, how big of a building block is he for the team moving forward?
GREG SCHIANO: When you watched him run tonight, he looked a lot like Kyle tonight now. He had a great game a couple weeks ago but tonight, against that defense, he really ran with authority. I thought he was a punishing runner tonight. He was a violent runner. Because some of those runs, with all due respect to everybody else, were all him. He made a guy miss in the backfield. He made another guy miss, and those are some — there’s plays that were blocked for him but there were some that he just made them on his own.
I was proud of his performance. Proud of him.
Q. What do you want to say about your offensive line?
GREG SCHIANO: Yeah, I thought — that’s always the hardest thing to see when you’re on the field. But when you have the results that you did in the run game, there were some plays that just came flying out of there.
Proud of all year long, proud of the toughness that they have displayed.
Q. You mentioned last week at Ohio State with some of fourth down calls that you made, you need to kind of be extra-aggressive to take over this game. Did you feel the same with some of the calls you made, including the fake field goal?
GREG SCHIANO: You know, I felt it was a little different matchup this week to be a hundred percent candid with you. But the fake field goal had so much confidence. Happens every time. This was the first time they didn’t do it, and I won’t get into details what “it” is, but it’s the first time all season they didn’t do it. Either real good coaching by them or somehow — somehow, something got out, I don’t know.
Q. What will it take to get this program to the next step?
GREG SCHIANO: Well, I refuse to get into the “woe is me,” right. But we’ve been operating at a completely different level than the people we compete with. So really what we’ve done is almost miraculous, and everybody wants to talk about things. They don’t — people don’t know the true facts of what has gone on. But I’m fine with it. I don’t need to justify our performances.
I really believed we would be playing again, this year, this team. Hurts very much but we’ll be back. We’ll be back. We have some people now that understand what it takes, and we’ll be back in the way we’re suppose to be. Won’t be overnight but it will happen.
Q. Last week of training camp, you were open about the defense being a work-in-progress. Why do you feel that unit never hit their stride or found that consistency you were hoping it would find at some point in the season?
GREG SCHIANO: It is a loaded question but it’s a very solid question, right. All season long, that’s been something that has kept us from winning as many games as we possibly could. And somewhere in that time, I tried to get more involved, and I did. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes I’m not sure it did anything.
There’s a lot, a lot. You lose key contributors. You lose two starters, at least, off that defense for the year, early in the season, one in training camp. Some years, you just don’t have it on one side of the ball or the other. This year we certainly didn’t have it when you look at how we performed.
So certainly my job to make sure we do have it because if we had it both this year, we’re competing for some very exciting stuff. So it definitely feels like a bit of a missed opportunity for sure.
Q. The way the offense played, the way you were leading in fourth quarter against Iowa, Minnesota and tonight, to not make a Bowl game, does this season feel like a step back or does it feel like a wasted season?
GREG SCHIANO: No, there’s never a wasted season. There’s are people lives you’re talking about. It not an article or something. I don’t mean that in a negative way. These are people that laid it on the line for an entire year, some of them four years here, right. And this is not an easy place to play. I know that we work hard. We have to.
Again, I don’t stand up here much and talk about it. If we do what other people do, we will win two games a year. We need to do more. We need to do this with finances. We need to train harder.
So you know what, that can get you sometimes. We’re going to get to the point where we don’t need to do that so much, and that’s what you can really capitalize on the talent of your players. And we’ll get into all that. We’ll get together at some point. We’ve signing day Wednesday, which is bang-bang (snapping fingers). We’ll get together and talk when I have more stuff to share with you because I think our fans deserve an answer on what could have been, what was. I get that.
I’m not sure I have the answer quite yet. I have some real thoughts. But I need a couple days to really just get by myself and do some thinking and talk to some people that I really respect their opinions. Then got to make some decisions. There’s no doubt about it.
Again, as I do every time, I really appreciate you coving the team. Some of you travel all over the country to see us play and to write about us and cover us, and I do appreciate it. I do. Every piece of this puzzle makes it special, and you’re certainly a big piece of the puzzle, so thanks.
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