Honestly, given Coach Wannstedt’s present reputation as a coach — especially after the way things ended with the Dolphins and the first 3 games of the season — if he wasn’t our coach, this story on Rutgers Coach Greg Schiano’s relationship with Dave Wannstedt would just cause you to start laughing (or if you were a Rutgers fan, weep).
“He’s been a mentor of mine that I’ve looked up to for a long time,” Schiano said Sunday. “Dave is a great person and has treated my family really well. I think he’s a great coach.”
Greg Schiano is 14-35 at Rutgers and has never had a winning season.
Hmmm. The other team showed up. Guess we still have to play.
Unfortunately, this would appear to be one of those themes you can bet the ESPN2 D crew calling the Friday night game will be banging.
Wannstedt and Rutgers coach Greg Schiano have a history. “If you coach long enough and you’re around good people, good people are going to end up in head coaching positions,” Wannstedt said. “Greg and I are good friends, but I keep the business part of it separate from the personal.” In 1996, when Wannstedt was head coach of the Chicago Bears, he hired Schiano as an assistant. Wannstedt also recommended Schiano to Butch Davis at Miami, where Schiano was defensive coordinator from 1998-2000. “(Wannstedt) has been a real mentor to me,” Schiano said. “I learned a lot (about) football and about handling players from him. I think that’s one of Dave’s strengths.”
There was an article on struggling coaches in their first year, especially when overhauling the system.
Trying to install a power running game with personnel suited for the West Coast offense is akin to mixing oil with water.
Go ahead and ask Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt, who is having trouble adjusting his system to the personnel he inherited from former coach Walt Harris.
Wannstedt is a believer in old-school football — get a tough defense and a good running game and you’ll be successful. It’s the system in which he has used all of his life, with varying amounts of success, at his several coaching stops.
But trying to run block with smaller linemen who were recruited to pass block and identifying running backs and receivers that best fit his system has produced disappointing results through the first month of the season.
The article has comments from other coaches who had a less than perfect first year. At least Bucknuts called it right when OSU Coach Tressel was asked the question on his weekly teleconference.
Tressel was also asked by a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter about being a first-year coach and the types of roadblocks that can occur (the question may have been influenced by University of Pittsburgh first-year head coach Dave Wannstedt’s rough start). Tressel, who first arrived at OSU in 2001, talked about some of his experiences during his first season.
“I think it’s more of a (case of) you haven’t had the time to develop relationships,” Tressel said. “Teams and families and communities or churches or whatever are built on relationships, and if you got in there in January and you run around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to make everyone happy from the alumni to the booster clubs to getting to know your players and putting a new staff together, you just run out of moments to develop relationships. One thing you feel better about when you’re in year two is that you know everyone so much better, and they know you and you know one another’s needs and expectations, and so that first year is really a grind from a standpoint of if you really want to get to know one another, that takes time, and time is the one thing you don’t have much of.
“I really think it has a lot to do with the personnel that’s returning and just how much experience you have coming back. You see some people take over teams that were very experienced and had showed that they could win, felt that they could win, and the relationships would be developed when you were doing that. Then other times, you take on situations where you don’t have quite as much experienced personnel, you have quite a transition as to who’s going to play, and you throw that together with the lack of time to build as strong of relationships you’d like to have, that makes it a difficult year. Really, it still comes back to the personnel involved.”
Pitt would appear to be somewhere in between those.
