Rutgers Head Coach Greg Schiano
GREG SCHIANO: Before I get into the game, I want to mention two members of the New Jersey football community who we lost recently, Xavier McClain from Linden, high school student, and Ali Muhammad from Rahway. Both young football players that were taken away too early. But to their families, I want you to know, our thoughts and prayers go out to you everybody from Rutgers, and everybody in our football program and everybody in our athletic department. Real sad to lose young men like that. I want to thank our fans. That was a great turnout, great atmosphere. That’s something to be seen in the future. Just wish we could have performed better. But we’re just not quite ready to do that yet in that environment, as when you’re ready, you do it. We just weren’t able to quite execute every job to the point where we put it together. So go back to work. Got a great challenge ahead of us next week, go out to Columbus. So a lot of work to do. But let me see if I can help you on any questions from tonight.
Q. Can you talk about Evan’s play? And you suited up Gavin and Noah. How close were they to being able to go?
GREG SCHIANO: I thought Evan did some really good things. Obviously the turnovers, the stat in the last 18 games when Iowa has not turned it over, they have won. And the fact of the matter is, in the last eight or nine games, we don’t turn it over, we’ve won. So that was going to be a critical part of this game. We turned it over three times and they didn’t. I think Evan grew up this week. Took a lot more plays than he has ever taken in practice. Those guys, the other two you mentioned, Noah and Gavin, were coming back at different rates. So at one point, we only had one guy that was actually operating in practice, and I think he grew. Unfortunately we turned it over twice and that really — I got done telling the team this, and I’ll share with you, every football game, it writes its own story. When you turn it like that and they score, that’s hard to overcome. I really thought that they fought, like all the way into the fourth quarter when we scored to make it a two-possession game, there wasn’t a guy on that sideline that didn’t believe we weren’t going to win. So that’s something that’s a positive. But we just weren’t up to the challenge tonight. We will be. This is temporary. We just need to be a little more consistent on offense. Defense, I thought played their guts out. We’re close on offense. We’ll get there.
Q. When you talk about not executing individual jobs, is that inexperience, youth? Is it just a lack of focus at times? What do you feel like has created that?
GREG SCHIANO: Some of its inexperience. Some of it, you know, people say lack of focus. Like it’s easy to focus, right, when someone is across the line is trying to knock your head off, right. So let’s not throw lack of focus around as a simple thing. There’s a lot of things to get you off your focus. That’s what you have to do when you play football in the Big Ten Conference. So I think it’s consistent focus, play after play after play, because it only takes, you know, like I said, every game takes on its own story. It only takes a play or two. That’s 14 points, and that kind of changed the complexion of the game. But they did. It’s all about doing it. You can talk about it. You can speculate. But you’ve got to go do it, and we didn’t get it done tonight.
Q. There have been times over the years where you guys have begged the crowd to come and show up and get here early, and for the crowd to be like that when you walked out of the tunnel first, how did it feel and how disappointing is it to not reward the fans?
GREG SCHIANO: It was really good to see it, for sure, right. That’s what we aspire to build in this program, and we’ve had it that way where it’s week-after-week-after-week is that way. Are we quite ready to perform the way we needed to tonight? I guess not, because we didn’t do it. Now, there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some of it’s inexperience. Some of it’s not executing. Some of it is coaching. There’s a whole bunch of reasons. But I do, I do want the fans to know, like I said when I took the job, we don’t need you when we’re Top-10, right. Then everybody wants to be here. They are part of building this just like we are, and I believe that our fans are awesome, and they are going to stick by us and they are going to get better, and they are going to see a lot of good football. But it’s a growth process for everybody. Fans included. We’re growing up. The whole program is growing up.
Q. On the injury front, Desmond Igbinosun did not dress up. Where is he at, what is his injury, and how long do you expect him to be out?
GREG SCHIANO: I’m not going to get into his injury, but I don’t know exactly how long he’ll be out. He’ll be back this season. I don’t know when. We’ll see how that plays out.
Q. And you mentioned Gavin and Noah both dressing and didn’t play. Is it a matter of them possibly be being able to come back next week? Are they close enough that that’s possible?
GREG SCHIANO: You know what they were available you could see in an emergency, emergency way. I don’t think they could play effectively tonight to win the game. That’s it. So when they can play effectively to win the game, they will be back in the mix. But that’s what it will be; it will be back in the mix, right. The competition will continue.
Q. With the running game, it seemed like you were getting three yards occasionally. Was that missing the blocks, or was that simply they are a really good defense?
GREG SCHIANO: Well, they are an elite defense. They are one of the top, over the last five years, top defenses, period, in America. I actually thought we did some things in the run game and early in the game. I mean, again, those turnovers for scores, we were actually moving the ball. You know, sometimes you look at your call sheet and what the heck, there’s nothing on here that’s working. Tonight, I didn’t feel that way. I felt there was a lot of things on the call sheet that were fine. Three-yard gain, four-yard gain, four-yard gain, first down there. Was enough going on good, but we turned the ball over. And when you do that, you know, it rewrites the story immediately. So I would have liked to have seen that but you know what, that’s life. Didn’t happen. Again it keeps coming back to what do you do. There’s no such things as missed opportunities. Someone takes it. Iowa took it. So we’ve got to learn to take it better.
Q. What did you think of your pass protection?
GREG SCHIANO: At times it was really good. At times I thought Evan was standing back there for a while and then delivered the ball. At other times we got whooped in a one-on-one battle and it was like this, it was on us. He showed some mobility, I think, extending plays. He’s never going to be the lightning quarterback, but he really showed some ability to avoid the rush and extend the plays. He had a completion on one that I can remember and then he threw it away a couple times. Mixed bag on the protection. Some really good, and then some not so. Guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for sticking around.
