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RUTGERS UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 8, 2010

Greg Schiano

COACH SCHIANO: Seems to be the norm, coming down to the wire. Very proud of our players, very proud of our coaching staff. Certainly a tough couple of weeks here. Then to play this game on a short week, like I said, I'm very proud. I think it's what we're about, just chopping through things, and that's our mantra, and to me it's very much synonymous with this place where we all live. It's not the prettiest sometimes, but tough people, tough kids on that team, tough people, and I'm real proud of them, proud of our staff.
It's one game. I want to enjoy this one victory for about 12 hours, and then it's on to Army. But we will enjoy this victory. It was a very hard-fought victory.

Q. Talk about the resiliency of this team, particularly after the first half ended, to get this win tonight.
COACH SCHIANO: Well, I think if you look at the first half it's a tale of three plays. It's a kickoff return for a touchdown -- we made one mistake tonight in the run game, and we made it, and it's really on me. We made a call that we really shouldn't have made, and that's my fault. And then the wheel route, they got us on a play that I thought we understood but we didn't, so that's me, too. Three plays, but it doesn't matter.
At the end of the game, if you lose, well, it's only three plays; yeah, it was the three plays they beat you with. Fortunately, like you said, there was a resiliency and a bunch of kids that hung together and chopped away and we were able to come out with a victory.

Q. You were confident that Chas could do it. Did he defy your expectations?
COACH SCHIANO: Really, no, and I don't want to sound like -- I really thought he could do special things. I think he went in there and he's a very cool customer. When we recruited Chas, you saw just what a fabulous player he was, but it's tough to pull the trigger on a guy who's just about six foot, and Kirk Ciarrocca and myself, we went around and around, but once we saw him in our camp and saw him throw and got to meet him, we knew he was a special guy.
I'm excited; we've got two special quarterbacks in our program. I know people want to talk about what now. Hey, I know we have two special quarterbacks in our program and I'm excited about that. I've said that all along, but now they've both won big games.

Q. Just in terms of Chas's accuracy and the touch that he showed, is that something he's been showing a lot in practice?
COACH SCHIANO: Very much so. You see a kid's high school performance and it gives you one set of feelings, but then you see him practice with college players through training camp. One of the things that occurred, Shim got hurt early from the very beginning, so Chas got all those No. 2 reps, and you could see that he really had a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge, and I think Ciarrocca has done a great job developing all our quarterbacks.

Q. Could you talk about Harrison and Deering and the games that they had?
COACH SCHIANO: Well, you know, I just didn't even look at the stat sheet but I know there's some big plays out there. Those are the plays we haven't made in the first four weeks. We haven't had a big pass play in the first four weeks, and I knew that it was coming. You know, again, we weren't perfect. We had some drops, as well. But when you make those big plays, it makes up for a lot of drops.
You could see Jeremy coming on, right; you could see him, he's so strong and so athletic, he just had to feel his way. He's not near to how good he's going to be, let me tell you.
Mark Harrison I've said all along is coming along, and I'm really proud of his progress not only out there on the football field but everything. He's really starting to get it. I'm certainly happy for him against his home state, being a Connecticut kid, certainly a huge play, and really happy for that young receiver's crew.
I think Coach Fleck has -- it's hard. You come and take a new job and the oldest guy you have is a red-shirt sophomore and everybody else is sophomores or freshmen, that's hard. One of the most positive guys I've been around, and I'm really happy for him tonight because I know how frustrated and how bad he felt that the guys weren't making some of those plays. I'm really happy for their whole group, the players and the coaches.

Q. Was Tom too injured to play?
COACH SCHIANO: He was. Could he have played in an emergency? He would have played. He threw -- I counted -- he threw about seven balls in warm-ups that showed me he could do it, but every time he walked back he was grimacing in pain.
The thing that we know is that this won't injure him more or we wouldn't have let him throw. We had an MRI done and we know what we're dealing with. I thought he was a really tough guy tonight to even go out there and approach it that way. I told him, look, we're only going to need you if something goes wrong, and if we do, you need to be ready, and we'll see if you can do it. He said, Coach, I'm ready to do it.

Q. Did you talk to San San at all about the field goal attempt?
COACH SCHIANO: No, he needs me like he needs a hole in the head. I had Rob ask him what hash he wanted. We usually know he'd like it in the middle but just wanted to make sure.

Q. Who's going to start the Army game?
COACH SCHIANO: That's a good question. We'll deal with that during the week. Certainly like I said, we have two very good quarterbacks, and that's something that's a blessing.

Q. With Tom during the game, how was his attitude on the bench and helping out Chas and everything?
COACH SCHIANO: It was great. To be frank with you, I was so into the game that I didn't see, but I did catch a few times when Chas came off the field and he and Tom were talking, so really good. That's the way this group of guys is. Granted, everybody gets disappointed when their playing time is diminished, but these kids stick together and that's something we take a lot of pride it.

Q. Penalties?
COACH SCHIANO: I don't take a lot of pride in that. I'm very frustrated. Again, and I look at who's incurring the penalties, for the most part, it's our younger players that have to learn -- there's a point of no return in a play where if you've done something wrong, don't make it more wrong. Let it go. Because some of those were brought back some nice plays, and you can't do that too many times against good football teams. Usually it gets you. So we're going to -- I wrote down midway during the game there's some things I want to do in practice that I've thought back to what we did some other times here that hopefully we can get that remedied because we've been very good in penalties over the years and now this is not characteristic of what we do.

Q. I know you take every game one at a time and all that stuff --
COACH SCHIANO: Yeah, that's true, that's not "stuff."

Q. I thought this game could have been a -- if you guys lost could have been really devastating, maybe not-get-off-the-floor kind of thing. Is there any way you can measure not only the way you won but the fact you won your first game of the season in the Big East?
COACH SCHIANO: It's good, it really is good, but it's one game, and I guarantee you, whether this game went well or didn't go well, this group of guys is sticking together and fighting. I'm glad it did go well, but -- I'm glad it went well.

Q. As far as the defense not giving you (indiscernible) second half and getting the ball back, can you talk about that?
COACH SCHIANO: They scrapped and clawed. I thought Connecticut did a very good job. They did some things -- there wasn't a lot of plays, but they did some things -- we got off the field, but we were searching and scrapping. It was a back-and-forth contest coaching-wise, and they always do a good job. I mean, it was another Rutgers-Connecticut game.

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