There's lengthy article on Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Greg Schiano by Mike Silver of Yahoo! Sports, starting with Schiano's decision to rush the Giants on the final play of their Week 2 game. From there he goes into Schiano's reputation around the league and his days as head coach at Rutgers, and the information Silver presents is far from positive. More on Schiano and reactions from Bucs fans after the jump.
The basic case is this: While at Rutgers Schiano was extremely restrictive with and percieved to be disrespectful towards NFL scouts. There are a lot of unnamed sources willing to pile on Schiano, and comparisons to other resctrictive or hard-nosed coaches are brushed aside because apparently Schiano is some special manner of jerk, just the absolute jerkiest jerk the NCAA had ever seen. Silver quotes an AFC executive:
"[Schiano] tried so hard to be a hard ass and went out of his way to be rude. When you'd pass him in the hallway, you might say, 'Good morning,' and he'd look at you like you're a [expletive] idiot. A guy like him doesn't realize that probably half of us played the game at a really high level - it's completely condescending. He would go out of his way to make you feel as uncomfortable as he could."
All of this might be damning, but Bucs fans aren't likely to be concerned. SB Nation's Buccaneers blog, Bucs Nation, didn't seem too concerned:
What he did at Rutgers, he did for the sake of that program - not for the sake of pissing people off. And what he'll do now in Tampa Bay will be done for the sake of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers - not for the sake of Rutgers....Overall, this is just a bunch of meaningless whining. Fascinating whining, nonetheless, but meaningless. His players don't care how he treated scouts at Rutgers, and his team doesn't - or at least, it shouldn't. Schiano is here to build the Bucs, not play buddy-buddy with NFL scouts.
At the end of the day, results are the only thing that matters. If Schiano can put together a successful Bucs franchise, he's likely to see his detractors fade to irrelevance and his attitude become an aura. Bucs fans certainly hope that's how it turns out.
For more on the Buccaneers, stick with SB Nation Tampa Bay or Bucs Nation.
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