Greg Schiano is back at Rutgers in his second stint as the school’s head football coach. He has had a long and winding road back to Rutgers that also included an extremely brief time as Michigan’s head coach.
Lloyd Carr was the Michigan Wolverines head football coach from 1995-2007. After he retired in 2007, the Wolverines searched for a replacement and landed on Schiano.
Ahead of Saturday’s Michigan-Rutgers game, Schiano talked about the matter with ESPN’s announcers. He confirmed to them that he actually briefly accepted the Michigan job before changing his mind.
“Greg Schiano did confirm to us that, for about six hours he was the coach at Michigan,” announcer Sean McDonough said. “Lloyd Carr retired. Greg Schiano was offered the job by then-athletic director Bill Martin.
“He said, ‘I accepted it. And I went to sleep on it for about six and a half hours.’ He said ‘I didn’t actually sleep, I couldn’t sleep. I decided I had not yet finished what I wanted to do at Rutgers. I owed it to the players who helped us build Rutgers up to the point where I’d be offered jobs like Michigan, to stay and keep advancing forward.'”
Schiano ended up remaining at Rutgers through 2011. He was there from 2001-2011 before leaving for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Schiano went to Ohio State and became a defensive coordinator from 2016-2018. He had the Tennessee job but the fans rejected him. He eventually ended up back at Rutgers and has already helped turn them around.
Michigan hired Rich Rodriguez, and we all know how that went.
How would Schiano have done at Michigan? We’ll never know. Though he might not have been a great fit there, he probably would have been a lot more successful than RichRod.
