Rest your weary link-clicking fingers for just a moment, five percent off sales can wait. Let’s celebrate Rutgers’ first November/December win since 2017. 

This win did not come on the field. It’s common knowledge by now that the birthplace of college football failed to hit the developmental milestones many of its peers did at least half a century ago. We know of the misery, but do we understand its depths? 

Forty-one winning seasons, 10 bowl appearances, two 10-win seasons, all since 1869. End of resume. Good luck on the LinkedIn endorsements. 

College football as a community understands the struggles that is finding success at Rutgers. Any sort of optimism usually flies eye-high straight into a windshield. The fractured body is too much to take in without at least a sniff of grain alcohol. Victories are all relative. 

The university announced Greg Schiano’s return to Rutgers after he chose the life of a hyperactive snowbird in Tampa for a few years followed by a brief stint in Ohio. The remarriage between the two went off with several hitches. 

Ah Rutgers, a proper noun made verb by the efforts and ineptitude of its football program. Things with Schiano went the way they sort of do when Rutgers is involved.Talks began in early November, stalled, yada yada yada, and that’s how Chris Christie credits himself for bringing Rutgers and Schiano together again. 

The former head coach returns to the sight of his and the football program’s highest heights. The mob action, a required phrase for the state with the largest number of waste management consultants per capita, turned in Schiano’s favor. 

Rutgers won the hire. There’s a sense of accomplishment from a fan base long considered dormant and athletic department that seemed to play sport scandal roulette more often than any one should in the last 10 years. Rutgers got the guy they wanted, the sort of biopic interspersed with enough Springsteen and Bon Jovi to stack a playlist for two summers on the Shore. Now if only everyone were so happy about a Jersey guy coming back to Jersey. 

Schiano’s hire allowed Tennessee fans, a group growing shorter on relevance and longer on historical reverence to tsk-tsk it and revisit their own successful castle storming a few years back that stopped Schiano’s hire in Knoxville so the school could hire Jeremy Pruitt and bask in the orange and white glow of a 12-12 overall record.  

Let a few years pass, move north, and the bain of one fan base’s existence is the savior for another. From dismissed to desired there’s enough of a gap in perception between what happened at Tennessee and what many hope will happen in Piscataway that both parties win. Well, relatively. 

This is still Rutgers. It’s still the Big Ten East. There’s a jolt of relevance to the program that did not exist during Kyle Flood or Chris Ash’s time at the university. Promises of a football facility and other assurances in Schiano’s contract make Rutgers at least pursuant to being competitive. Now it’s easy and convenient to forecast failure based on the state of the program and its divisional rivals. 

Opinion manufacturers who bet the house on a Schiano failure at Rutgers are playing action at -350. The deck is stacked against anyone who took the job, but there’s credibility in the known. 

Schiano’s familiarity with the state, inroads to its preeminent high school football programs, and the goodwill his hire engendered from the sleepy faithful at least generates enthusiasm for the program unseen in the last seven or eight seasons. Competence and relevance over excellence in the foreseeable future. 

We all see the task that is success at New Jersey’s state university. Besides the long-standing pull of losses, few favors are done by the division. With the exception of Maryland and Michigan State if the Spartans wish to commemorate six-win seasons with more gear. Even Indiana seems to be a program with a healthy dose of optimism as to its future. Schiano should know based on his time at Ohio State.

Schiano’s run there ended when he was not asked back as defensive coordinator last season and instead somehow ended up as the defensive coordinator for the New England Patriots. For Urban Meyer and Bill Belichick to think highly enough about Schiano and have him on their staff says he’s earned the regard of people who’ve earned the regard of everybody.  Yes, things at Ohio State ended with an overly complicated system and a defense that looked confused, but Schiano understands the talent gap at Rutgers and will lean on past experiences to scheme accordingly. 

In the meantime it’s okay for Rutgers to celebrate the win even if it took some governors, an athletic director stripped of his powers, and nearly a month of negotiations to make it work. 

The Scarlet Knights won the hire, making it a three-win season for only the third time in the last five years. Progress!