How will a team like Rutgers ever build quality depth in an era of NIL?
We can’t have offense and defensive philosophies that require nearly every position to play like a 4-star player. It can’t be that 1 or 2 injuries essentially destroy the integrity of the scheme.
We ought to be running schemes where it’s easier to plug and play players as they come and go.
On offense, that’s Air Raid where everything is simplified — just get really good at running a handful of formations/concepts.
On defense, that’s an attacking style where you are given one assignment and defenders are doing less “reading”. That lends itself to more single-gap, blitzing and man coverage.
You can get newer and/or younger players on the field with greater success if they don’t have to worry about too many different things mentally.
Anyway, just talking out loud in an effort to calm myself down.
This is reflective of what I've been saying about NIL for the last several years.
The original vision of NIL - allowing players to seek compensation for use of their name, image and likeness, wasn't particularly disruptive. But its Wild West implementation, which is nothing more than a pay for play scheme, is IMO fatally disruptive. It ensures the ability of deep-pocket schools to get the best players. It ultimately results in a "Big 20" (or 10, or 25, or whatever) being able to collect all of the top-tier talent while all of the other schools are battling for 3-star players and minor bowls.
The only way for those schools to be competitive, going forward, is to be innovative. Whatever positive things you can say about Greg, "innovative" is most assuredly not one of them.
NIL has been the "MTV moment" of college revenue sports - "video killed the radio star", etc. One of the reasons I decided to give up my season tickets, after 37 years, was that I wasn't comfortable resetting my expectations to something like "reasonable" while being forced to pay more and more money each year.
Schiano is the 8th highest paid coach among the 18 B1G coaches, only a few shekels behind James Franklin. Rutgers will struggle to become bowl-eligible this season. It's not unrealistic to say that we're overpaying for average results, we have consistently done so (with the peculiar exception of Kyle Flood) and the overall value prop is not likely to improve. There are still people in this fan base - in this very thread - who insist that "Schiano is the best coach we can get for the money", which to me is sadly absurd given that he's been beaten this season by two coaches who, combined, make only $1M more than he does.
The status quo will continue for a few more years. We'll run out Greg's contract, the fans will be asked to pay more each year for season tickets and parking while at the same time being relentlessly solicited to write checks to the NIL collectives, AKA "player compensation funds" and it still won't be enough to compete with the top-tier teams stacked with megadonors and the ability to siphon off the best players, at will. By that time, IMO, football will be resolving into two very specific levels of play - one "super conference" and "the rest", which will likely be comprised of a level of regionalization that looks a lot like 30 or 40 years ago. Broadcast money will be heavily weighted toward the top tier and the lesser schools will be looking at increasing budget deficits within their football programs, at which point the necessary adjustments will be made, further degrading the product.
