When current Terrapin senior Carlos Feliciano was being recruited, Rutgers coach Greg Schiano made countless appearances at Feliciano’s New Jersey high school, trying hard to land the defensive lineman.
Schiano’s sales pitch to Feliciano was simple: Come to Rutgers, help restore the program and be remembered for bringing it back to prestige.
“No thanks,” Feliciano told the coach. “I’ll go to Maryland.”
Who would have thought Schiano could have actually lived up to that pitch? For countless years, Rutgers football was an opponents’ punching bag. It was the butt of jokes, almost always ranked in the very bottom tier of college football. Now, it is a top-10 team with national exposure.
“I’m still scratching my head,” junior wide receiver Isaiah Williams said. “It’s really miraculous how they turned their whole program around.”
Rutgers’ success was the feel-good story of 2006, and it has spilled over into the start of the 2007 season. Now, the Scarlet Knights are a more-than-respectable football team and could even enter the national championship picture if they go undefeated.
Undefeated and Rutgers in the same sentence? Imagine that.
“Coach Schiano’s just done a fabulous job and is really doing unprecedented things with Rutgers’ whole program,” Terp coach Ralph Friedgen said. “My hat’s off to him and the job he’s done.”
Saturday, the Terps travel to Piscataway, N.J., to take on the restored Rutgers Scarlet Knights, who, in the last year, have brought an incredible buzz to the New York/New Jersey area, which doesn’t exactly have a rich tradition when it comes to college football. It will be the first time since 1942 the two teams have met.
But there’s more to what goes into a game than the actual four quarters being played and the final score. Underneath “Terps versus Rutgers” lies an intense recruiting battle for talented players in the New Jersey area that has heated up with Rutgers’ resurgence.
Arming the Knights
Schiano was hired in 2001, but the turnaround wasn’t immediate. In his first four seasons with Rutgers, Schiano was 12-34. But once his recruiting classes started to fit into place, Schiano thrived. Since 2005 (Rutgers’s first winning record in 12 seasons), the Scarlet Knights are 21-7, including last year’s 11-win season.
“It took awhile,” Schiano said. “We fixed a lot of the infrastructure of the program and academically got our program sound, but it took a little while longer for the results on the field to come about.”
Schiano tried to snag a few players currently playing for the Terps, including Feliciano, Danny Oquendo, Williams and Alex Wujciak. But, like any program, success on the field usually means success in recruiting as well, and that made things a lot tougher for Rutgers.
“They were terrible,” said Oquendo, who lives 30 minutes from Rutgers. “I used to go [to games] with a few of my friends who were my age. We would just run around the whole stadium like in the upper tier to the lower tier, running wherever we wanted because no one was there.”
Oquendo likened the atmosphere at Rutgers’ games to the one the Terps played in earlier this year at Florida International.
“A lot of people dressed up as bleachers,” Oquendo said.
Even as Schiano and his staff were fierce recruiters, they didn’t have the stats to back it up. The Terps, on the other hand, had nothing but success since Friedgen was hired.
“[The Terps] had three straight bowl games,” Feliciano said. “Rutgers hadn’t gone to a bowl game in a real long time.”
Eventually, though, Rutgers started winning games under Schiano. First it was an upset over Michigan State. Then it was a 7-5 season and an appearance in the Insight.com Bowl. And, finally, it was last season’s win against then-No. 3 Louisville, one of college football’s lasting images from 2006.
“They were just waiting for that one year to transition from a bad team to average, and then from average to top 10,” Oquendo said.
Recruiting the Turnpike
When this game was scheduled – back in 1995, according to Athletics Director Debbie Yow – the Terps had recruiting on their minds. Non-conference games are usually scheduled years in advance, so there have been times when the Terps have scheduled games against bad teams, only to see a reversal of fortune, as in the case of Rutgers.
“That’s just the chance you take,” Friedgen said.
Earlier this week, Friedgen pointed out that Northern Illinois was a similar example; the Huskies were a horrible team, but by the time they arrived on the Terps’ schedule in 2003, they were drastically improved, and the result was a 20-13 Northern Illinois win.
“We’d normally go for two games that we think, on paper, we should win,” Yow said. “On paper, we should win. And we try to play them early in the season, so the coaching staff can work on different personnel combinations in the game and work on different schemes to get them ready for the rest of the season.
“There used to be only three non-conference games; you have to think back to that,” Yow said. “And now there’s four. So, usually, [we schedule] a couple that, on paper, we should be able to win, and then one that’s very, very challenging that would not necessarily be a win on paper, and that for us has been West Virginia.”
Yow said the athletics director, head coach and chief financial officer for athletics work on scheduling, and when the Terps agreed to play Rutgers, recruiting played a factor in that decision.
“Historically, the Northeast corridor has been huge for us in all our sports, not just one,” said Yow, who also noted the Terps try to schedule games within a reasonable driving distance for students, fans and boosters.
When the Terps scheduled this game, they did so partly with the intention of winning in a potential recruiting area.
That was then, and this is now.
Schiano has swooped up a lot of homegrown talented recruits who may have gone elsewhere in the past.
“It’s been kind of an evolution,” Schiano said. “The thing that we committed to was that we were gonna recruit a certain geographic area. We labeled that area the state of Rutgers, which is New Jersey and the states that touch up against it. Not the entire states, but where it’s a two-hour drive from our campus or so.”
Bragging rights
With 15 players on the Terp roster hailing from New Jersey, Saturday’s game will naturally be about bragging rights.
Feliciano, Oquendo and Williams are among a few players who have friends on the Rutgers team. But the bragging rights go beyond sending text messages or instant messages after the game – they transition into the recruiting battle as well.
A win for either team, and recruiters already have an advantage by pointing out the game results.
“Obviously, it helps. There’s no doubt about that,” said Terps’ recruiting coordinator Dave Sollazzo, who is responsible for the New York/northern New Jersey area. “Anytime you can have bragging rights, it’s gonna help, but there’s no magic formula in recruiting. Some kids want to get away, some kids want to stay close to home. It just depends on the kid. I think we’re always gonna do very well in New Jersey because of the proximity to Maryland.”
The Terps didn’t recruit New Jersey very much before Friedgen, Sollazzo and the rest of the current staff came here. But, noticing the talent in the area, the Terps wanted to recommit themselves there.
“That was our priority when we came back here,” Sollazzo said. “There’s good football in New Jersey, and there’s a lot of good football players, and they take it very seriously there. Like anything else, we made it a priority, and we went back there, and we worked hard and now we’re reaping the benefits because of that.”
Even after Rutgers’ 11-win season, the Terps still had success recruiting in that part of the country. This offseason, the Terps reeled in five recruits from the New York/New Jersey area, which was as many recruits as from the Maryland/Washington/Northern Virginia area.
“We didn’t have that when we first got here,” Friedgen said. “It’s an area we both work very, very hard. I think [Rutgers has] some of the same similar problems with kids staying close to home. Some kids just want to go away. Not every kid’s meant to go to Rutgers or Maryland, so you just have to get the ones you can get.”
Fans Bleed Scarlet
After the final seconds ticked off the clock during Rutgers’ program-changing victory against Louisville last year, a moving sea of red replaced the previously green turf.
It was the final touches on an amazing reversal. If you had told someone five years ago that, in 2007, there was a game on the college football schedule that had the unranked Terps playing at No. 10 Rutgers, it would have been taken as a joke.
“Not only do I call you a liar, I call you a … I don’t know what to call you at that point,” said Williams, who grew up 20 minutes from Rutgers. “That’s just not gonna happen. Rutgers is never gonna win that many games, never gonna be ranked No. 10 in the nation, and for damn sure, we wouldn’t be looked at as the underdogs going into that game.
“[Shoot], it’s just really weird to look at it this way,” Williams added.
Saturday’s game is sold out and on national television, like many other Scarlet Knights games this season.
Just three or four years ago, college football was hardly a big deal in New Jersey and New York City. Now, the Empire State Building gets lit up in red, while big Rutgers highlight reels are being broadcast on the big screen at Times Square.
“They’re a very, very good football team right now,” Friedgen said. “Maybe the best team we’ve played.”
Rutgers? Go figure.
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