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Report: Greg Schiano, Rutgers Agree to 8-Year, $32M Contract to Return as HC

Paul KasabianSenior ContributorDecember 1, 2019

COLUMBUS, OH - SEPTEMBER 22:  Defensive Coordinator Greg Schiano of the Ohio State Buckeyes instructs his team during a game against the Tulane Green Wave at Ohio Stadium on September 22, 2018 in Columbus, Ohio.  (Photo by Jamie Sabau/Getty Images)
Jamie Sabau/Getty Images

Greg Schiano has "agreed in principle" to return to Rutgers for his second stint as its head football coach, according to Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports.

Per Bruce Feldman of The Athletic, the deal is for eight years and $32 million:

Bruce Feldman @BruceFeldmanCFB

SOURCE: #Rutgers and Greg Schiano have agreed to an 8-year, $32 million deal with $25.2 million guaranteed, and RU promise to look into building a football-only facility: https://t.co/kVFDe1s1ls

The Scarlet Knights finished a 2-10 season with a 27-6 loss to Penn State on Saturday.

Rutgers fired head coach Chris Ash after a 1-3 start, and Nunzio Campanile took over as the interim head coach, going 1-7. Rutgers went 0-9 in Big Ten play.

Schiano, 53, went 68-67 for Rutgers from 2001-11. The record is mediocre on paper, but the Scarlet Knights won just 24 games from 1993-2000 and markedly improved under him.

Rutgers won five bowl games from 2006-11 after having appeared in only one postseason game prior to his era.

Rutgers' best season under Schiano occurred in 2006, when the Scarlet Knights started 9-0 and reached No. 7 in the Associated Press poll. They finished 11-2 with a win over Kansas State in the Texas Bowl.

Schiano left Rutgers for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2012 but did not find the same success in the NFL, going 11-21 over two seasons before his dismissal.

He coached at Berkeley Preparatory School from 2014-15 before joining Urban Meyer's Ohio State staff as a defensive coordinator and associate head coach. He was there for three seasons, helping guide the program to three Top Six finishes in the AP poll. He was replaced after the season when Ryan Day took over as head coach, and Schiano has not coached in 2019.

Schiano has undoubtedly enjoyed success on the collegiate level, but his record is not without controversy. He received much criticism for his time with the Bucs, with NFL.com's Michael Silver reporting he "lost his locker room" with an "autocratic" style.

In 2017, Des Bieler and Cindy Boren of the Washington Post reported:

"In a 2015 deposition that was unsealed last year, former Nittany Lions assistant coach Mike McQueary testified that another Penn State coach had told him that Schiano had talked of seeing [Jerry] Sandusky abusing a boy in the early 1990s.

"'Greg had come into his office white as a ghost and said he just saw Jerry doing something to a boy in the shower,' McQueary said he heard of Schiano, who worked under Sandusky at Penn State from 1990 to 1995, according to the court document."

Schiano responded to the allegation, saying, via ESPN's Adam Schefter, "I never saw any abuse, nor had reason to suspect any abuse, during my time at Penn State."

At the time, Schiano was up for the University of Tennessee head coaching job and had a memorandum of understanding with the school, but "public outcry" caused the Vols to rescind their offer, per ESPN.

The head coach will soon be back on collegiate sidelines, as he returns to the program with which he found much success in the 2000s.