Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano has been known to ruffle some feathers from time to time.
Whether it was blitzing during the Denver Broncos' victory formation when he was the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the time he pissed off the entire Tennessee Vols fan base because he almost became UT's head coach, Schiano has a knack for finding controversy.
So it should be no surprise that Schiano started the 2024 season off by pissing off Howard's head football coach.
Rutgers beat Howard 44-7 on Thursday night. The score should've been 38-7, but Schiano decided to run the ball from the 11 yard line with seven seconds left in the game. The play resulted in a touchdown, which didn't sit well with Howard head coach Larry Scott.
Scott, who was the offensive coordinator at Tennessee in 2017 when Schiano was nearly hired by the Vols, approached Schiano immediately after the game and appeared to be displeased with Rutgers' decision to score with just seven seconds remaining.
Scott was understandably miffed, suggesting that he would've handled the situation differently, though he stopped short of throwing any shade at Schiano.
"I think we're both two competitive people," said Scott ( via ESPN ). "And in that situation, I would choose to handle it a little bit differently. I can't speak for him. I have a lot of respect for Coach Schiano, what he's done and what he's been able to do. But we're both competitive. And in that situation, you know, just a little bit of frustration came out because I thought it would have been handled differently. But he might as well."
Schiano told reporters after the game that he wasn't trying to run the score up, instead he was just letting his players play.
"Guys practiced all training camp. They deserve to play," said Schiano. "There was no running it up. If it was running it up, you don't use timeouts when you have the ball. You let the game end. That wasn't retaliatory. We were going to run plays. We bring a team in here to play us. We bring them here. We bring them in, we've got to win and we've got to get reps. And they were there, we took them."
I gotta side with Schiano on this one. It's similar to Tennessee's situation against Missouri in 2022 when Josh Heupel was criticized for scoring late (with 36 seconds left to play in a blowout). Similar to Schiano, Heupel told reporters that he wanted to let his players play in that situation.
“It absolutely went through my mind (to take a knee),” said Heupel after the Missouri game in 2022. “Don’t know what the right thing was to do there at that moment. At the end of the day, our guys continue to play football.”
Competitors compete until the end. I think that's the message that Heupel was sending in 2022 and it's the same message that Schiano sent against Howard on Thursday night.
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