Really unfortunate you stick with "destroyed." That's nonsense and your choice. St. Greg's rock foundation was starting to weaken by the end of his tenure. His 2010 class was #64, lower than all three of Kyle Flood's. For what we pulled off in 2006, we should have killed it in recruiting in the following years. Destroyed? SMH.
I consider myself to be fairly authoritative on Greg's "process", for reasons that the long-term folks here understand.
The reality is that here and now, 15 or so years later, the program is a melange of Greg Goodness, Flood F*ckups and plain, old entropy. When Greg came here, Rutgers football had zero visibility. The PR campaign put together by him and his staff - reaching out to the high school programs, reaching out to the Pop Warner programs, all of that still works. Rutgers football isn't a "hot commodity" in the eyes of many high school coaches and athletes, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was a decade and a half ago.
The overall construct of the program, internally, definitely decayed. Conditioning suffered, discipline suffered, the quality of the "student athlete", overall, suffered. Some of that is because of Flood's "Nice Guy" image and the fact that he really did want to be seen as a "father figure" to his players. Part of it is due to the fact that his recruiting targets became riskier as his perception decayed. Part of it is, I think, just plain laziness or intentional de-emphasis. For example, a lot of the structure around class attendance and classroom performance and accountability was just outright kicked to the curb under Kyle's reign.
The program, here and now, isn't destroyed, it's not dead. It is, however, in desperate need of a fresh start. I think Ash is rather "Greg-like" with respect to his drive and motivation. He reminds me a lot of Schiano in many ways. He seems to be a bit less of a dick, which may play to his favor.
Similarly, Hobbs reminds me, at least at the 100,000' level, of Bob Mulcahy. He's shrewd, he's politically savvy and he's well-connected.
It's the sort of dynamic that Rutgers football requires to be successful. The program had no chance of continued success under Flood & Julie. That's not to say that the two of them can't be successful elsewhere, but they never would have been successful here. New Jersey requires a certain level of
chutzpah that the two of them just didn't have.
