Rutgers will make changes in 2027 after retaining Greg Schiano. Here are 5 suggestions.
· Yahoo Sports
Greg Schiano is coming back to Rutgers next season, but the program plans to make changes around him.
Sitting at 2-7 overall and 1-5 in the Big Ten with three games remaining, the Scarlet Knights will finish with a losing record and miss a bowl game for the second consecutive season. They have lost nine of their last 10 games against FBS opponents, including a stunning upset to UMass that immediately doomed the 2026 campaign.
Visit betsport.cv for more information.
While that was not enough for Rutgers to make a change at the top — finances played a major role in that — the poor play and mounting losses will prompt the Scarlet Knights to adjust.
Rutgers moneyline is listed at +540 on Novig for Saturday’s matchup against Nebraska. Also, make sure to visit our guide to the best sportsbook promos to shop for odds.
“The landscape has changed in college football immensely,” Schiano said Tuesday. “There’s some things that we do that we got to double down on because they’re uniquely productive, especially for us at Rutgers. There’s other things we got to change. There’s other things I got to change. I’ve made mistakes that I look back and say, ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that,’ and it had an effect on winning games.
“There’s things that are going to have to change, and we’ve already started that philosophically and in our planning,” Schiano continued. “Those things will happen ... There’s some changes we have to make and I wouldn’t speculate ‘Oh, it’s this person,’ there’s just changes we have to make to progress with the times, to progress with modern-day college football and for us to be able to be competitive. That’s what we need to do.”
Here are five suggestions for what the Scarlet Knights should change:
1) Hire a general manager, relinquish some control
The season ends in a little over three weeks, and the transfer portal window opens in two months, meaning the clock is ticking on this potential addition. But Schiano seemed to hint that it was possible when asked directly about it.
“There’s nothing that is off the table for examination,” Schiano said. “At the end of the season, we’re going to make moves and we’re going to make them quickly. And look, there could even be some before the end of the season.”
Like most Big Ten teams, Rutgers has a scouting apparatus to prepare itself for the free agency period in the offseason. But the Scarlet Knights need someone with experience and proven success at building a roster — whether that is at the NFL or college level — leading the operation. While Schiano ultimately will have final say on what players to pursue, he cannot be the main person behind the effort.
“Everybody’s joined at the hip to do the best job we can,” Schiano said. “Part of putting together the best roster in (2027) is going to be the business side of it, the evaluation side of it, and then the recruiting side of it. You can’t lose sight that even though there’s money, everybody’s got money, so you got to go recruit. So part of the portal process is the recruitment, and we have to do well in all three areas, and we will.”
2) Revamp the entire defense (again), starting up front
Rutgers has one of the worst defenses in college football once again, which means it has to undergo another complete overhaul to the unit. This time, however, Schiano will (presumably) have a defensive coordinator in place to help him attack the transfer portal.
After back-to-back winters of two-month searches for a DC, Travis Johansen is expected to be back for a second season leading the defense. That will remove one major question transfer portal recruits had in the last two cycles — “Who is going to call the defense?” — that hampered the Scarlet Knights’ efforts.
The issues are at all three levels and they manifest in multiple statistical categories — from a lack of sacks (120th nationally) and takeaways (113th nationally) to a high number of points (124th nationally) and yards (87th) allowed per game. To borrow an analogy Schiano used during the 2024 season, the Scarlet Knights have to “strip it down to the studs” and start from square one.
The fix must start up front.
The Scarlet Knights are slated to finish in the bottom 15 nationally in sacks once again (they finished second-to-last in 2025), and the lack of a pass rush puts the rest of the defense in a poor position. Opposing quarterbacks have run all over Rutgers, partly because of the ease with which they can escape pressure in the pocket and partly because the Scarlet Knights have had some of the worst linebacker play in the country.
Rutgers needs to remake its linebacker room, add multiple edge rushers who can effectively get to the quarterback and bolster its interior line with run stuffers. It likely needs to revamp its entire safeties room as well, but it could probably get away with minimal additions at cornerback if it retains its promising young defensive backs.
3) Get a Big Ten-caliber quarterback, offensive line
Schiano entered the season with a belief that his team could win no matter which quarterback won the preseason position battle. That has not been the reality through the first nine games.
While Dylan Lonergan and AJ Surace both have eligibility remaining, Rutgers has to move on and find new quarterbacks.
After moneyballing the position this fall while spending heavily on the pieces around it — namely on stud receiver KJ Duff and running back Antwan Raymond — the Scarlet Knights need to pool a large chunk of their roster resources and pour it into the position to get a high-caliber signal-caller out of the portal.
Rutgers knows the impact an above-average quarterback has on a team after watching Athan Kaliakmanis elevate the offense for two seasons, something that was made even clearer in his absence.
To aid their quarterback, Rutgers needs to augment its offensive line.
The Scarlet Knights won’t be able to afford five new high-level starters — they only have so much money, and a lot of it should go toward their defense and quarterback — but they must raise the level of a unit that gave up 38 sacks last fall (3.2 per game) and has conceded 25 in nine games (2.78 per game) this season.
One solution: rather than stock up on depth, invest in a shallower pool of players with more talent. It is a risk in an injury-prone position, but it may be one they must take to make the most of their resources.
4) Expand risk tolerance
Ahead of facing his former defensive coordinator Joe Harasymiak in the season opener, Schiano was asked how he approaches a familiar foe.
“We’re not really in the business of trying to trick you,” he said. “We’re going to try to do what we do.”
That encapsulates a trend that crept up steadily throughout his second stint.
In his first three years back in Piscataway, Schiano had an offensive coordinator in Sean Gleeson who was not afraid to throw out trick plays and experiment beyond a vanilla base offense. It blew up in his face by the end of his tenure, with Schiano berating him on the sideline during a close win over Temple and firing him after a close loss to Nebraska, but Gleeson helped the Scarlet Knights punch above their weight early in Schiano’s tenure.
Rutgers has gone into a shell in comparison under offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca, whose meat-and-potatoes offense has one of the lowest pre-snap motion rates in college football, rarely throws screens and scarcely uses the tight end as a receiver.
The Scarlet Knights have had success under Ciarrocca thanks to elite talent at running back (Kyle Monangai, Antwan Raymond) and wide receiver (Duff, Ian Strong), as well as strong quarterback play from Kaliakmanis. But unless they hit a home run across all positions this offseason, they likely won’t be good enough to consistently beat elite Big Ten defenses.
The same thought extends to special teams.
The Scarlet Knights rarely return punts or kickoffs, citing the advantage spelled out by analytics on the latter and the risk of fumbles on the former. But what Rutgers gains by making the safe play, it loses opportunities for game-changing moments.
Rutgers has not returned a kick for a touchdown since the 2020 season, a stretch of 72 consecutive games. It returned five punts during the entire 2024 season, and three of them went for touchdowns (two of which came against Norfolk State). It has not blocked a single kick this season — a staple of Schiano teams for much of his 18 seasons in Piscataway.
If the Scarlet Knights don’t excel on offense or defense, they’ll need to make up the difference in the third phase of the game that Schiano once emphasized as much as the other two.
5) Be more transparent with fans, particularly through media
The season-opening loss to UMass was stunning to Rutgers fans in part because of what they heard about their team leading up to it.
Schiano called it the “deepest and most talented” team of his second stint in Piscataway. He said it had “two quarterbacks we can win with,” claimed the offensive line was so deep that the backups would have been the starters and that the defense would be better than the previous season’s disastrous unit.
They had to take his word for it.
There was no spring game to get a glimpse of a roster with dozens of new players. The local media are not allowed to watch any portion of practice outside two scrimmages in training camp, and are muzzled about what they can report regarding the little they do witness. The Big Ten Network’s hour-long training-camp tour program does not have enough time to share an all-encompassing, big-picture analysis.
That left a lot of diehard fans feeling isolated from the program, and it made the impact of this calamitous season even harder on them. The Scarlet Knights will be fighting hard all offseason to keep as many of their 24,263 season ticket holders for another year.
They can win some back with less paranoia and more transparency.
— Hold an open practice of some kind in the spring, even if it is not officially a spring game. With January’s transfer portal window long over, there is no danger of players being poached, and the amount of advanced scouting opposing teams can do is limited.
— Allow local reporters to attend portions of practice and write/discuss what they see. This will give fans a glimpse into the program they support outside the three-month fall season and give them something to get excited about.
— Let players speak to reporters on camera — a majority of fans consume content on video in the modern social media era — and allow them to speak candidly. The transfer portal era makes it harder than ever for fans to connect with players because they don’t have four years to get to know them, but that gap can be bridged by allowing players to show their faces and share their personality rather than dish out program platitudes of Family, Trust, Chop.
Would those changes help Rutgers win more football games? Almost certainly not. But they would likely make fans more inclined to give grace to the program they’ve stuck with through another stretch of poor football and bad results.
Read the original article on NJ.com. Add NJ.com as a Preferred Source by clicking here.