NOT long ago, Rutgers football was buried so far in the deep sub-consciousness of metropolitan sports that it couldn’t even come up with its own original self-deprecating jokes. A few years ago, Bob Mulcahy, the athletic director, was chatting up a few alums in a mostly empty stadium parking lot one game day.
“I got a call the other day,” Mulcahy said, “and the fan said, ‘Hey, what time is the Rutgers football team playing? And I asked, ‘What time can you make it?’ ”
A few hours later, after Rutgers had lost to Connecticut or New Hampshire or Villanova – the blurry indignities all tend to run together – Mulcahy was spotted slumped on a chair, all the blarney beaten out of him.
“One of these days,” he said, “there will be signs everywhere that Rutgers has arrived, and when those days come, I hope I can forget all about nights like this one.”
Now you have a hard time walking down a street in New Jersey without seeing a Rutgers flag planted proudly on the side of a house, without seeing a freshly applied bumper sticker screaming from the back of a sedan. New Jersey has become smitten by a football team going for its 10th victory in 10 games tomorrow evening in Cincinnati, sitting sixth in the latest BCS poll.
Coach Greg Schiano is on TV more than “CSI.” The whole state has started to look, and feel, like a supersized college town, Knoxville or Tuscaloosa or Gainesville or Ann Arbor on HGH.
“A few years ago, if you said the name ‘Rutgers’ to a really good football player who didn’t live in New Jersey, they’d give you a blank look,” Max Emfinger said. “They don’t look at you that way any more.”
The fact that you just read Max Emfinger’s name in the New York Post may be the most improbable sign yet of just where Rutgers is. Emfinger runs one of the oldest and most respected recruiting services in the country, and if you were sitting in a Shoney’s or a Bob Evans or a Cracker Barrel in Austin or Norman or Lincoln or Fayetteville reading this, there would be nothing at all unusual about that. Where football matters, Emfinger’s opinions matter most.
“They’ve hit the world by storm this year,” Emfinger said. “Right now, they’re winning with special kids who came to Rutgers because they were under-recruited or undervalued by other schools, or because they’re Jersey kids who knew better, and what they’ve done there is off the charts in my opinion.
“But what I find very intriguing is that now that Rutgers has a name, now that they’re in the Top 10, now that they’ve beaten Louisville on TV in a game that everyone seemed to watch, now they’re going to have a chance to recruit kids from all over the country. Kids want to play at places like Rutgers, and for coaches like Greg. This is where things can really go into orbit for them.”
Emfinger says there’s still little chance that a kid who can be a star at Notre Dame or USC will likely pick Rutgers, yet.
“They aren’t going to get Reggie Bush, OK,” Emfinger said. “But there are a lot of kids who are just a shade below Reggie Bush, and if you get enough of those kids, there’s no telling what you can do. Rutgers has gotten the message out. Now it’s a matter of seeing how many kids get it.”
Can Rutgers build on this year? Can it sustain? Emfinger has been around a lot of years, seen a lot of things. He saw what Bill Snyder did at Kansas State and what Hayden Frye did at Iowa, reclamation projects that certainly compare to what Schiano has done. He also saw both Snyder and Frye grow weary of recruiting burdens as time went on.
“But neither of those guys,” he said, “was near as young as Schiano.”
“It always comes back to that, to the coach who forged this dream and delivered more than anyone could have believed,” Emfinger said. “He’s the biggest guy on the block right now. You keep him, you could be special for a lot of years to come.”
For now, Rutgers worries about Cincinnati, and Syracuse next week, and West Virginia later on. Which, given where this program was not long ago, hardly constitutes as worry at all.