It's not just that we weren't very good before Schiano. It's that we LITERALLY played a 1-AA schedule up until about 1980 (when the distinction started to be made between the 1-A and 1-AA levels) and then we were funded like a 1-AA program for an additional 20 years until GS got here (I realize that was Rutgers fault and no one else's). Would Syracuse fans brag about beating up on Colgate or Lehigh during the same time period? And despite being virtually a 1-AA program we still managed to knock off the likes of Tennessee at UT ('79), PSU at Happy Valley and Michigan State in East Lansing (both in 1988) and tied #3 Florida in The Swamp in 1985. However, even with these major upsets, Rutgers could never put together complete successful seasons. And then 1994-2002 happened when, let's face it, we became an embarrassment to the sport. But people seem to take that '94-'02 time period and extrapolate it throughout our entire history which is extremely inaccurate.
If you want to point to 25 years of futility between us leaving the 1-AA ranks in 1980 and 2004, that is more than fair. And we are still working toward trying to erase that stigma, one competitive year at a time (last year being a bump in the road). But there are plenty of folks (i'm too young but there are people) who don't want to "forget Rutgers history prior to Schiano". They just want to forget the seasons between Burns and Schiano. Many still look back fondly on our days playing Princeton, Lehigh, Colgate and Lafayette and we have nothing to be ashamed of from that era.
