Small Schools Thrilled To Dust Off the Old Bowling Shoes
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Many hours on the airwaves and much newspaper ink will be devoted to breathlessly previewing the January 4 Texas-USC Rose Bowl matchup, which will no doubt be billed as the most anticipated college football game of all time.
The focus on the Bowl Championship Series title game, though richly deserved this year, tends to overshadow not only the other BCS games, but every other contest on the 28-game bowl schedule. College football playoff proponents tend to sneer at the lower tier bowls, with their frequent matchups of 6-5 teams and plentiful empty seats, suggesting that the whole system needs to be scrapped.
But there’s a reason those games exist, and hidden on that crowded bowl calendar are some great stories. Don’t tell the coach and players of Akron, for example, that nobody cares about their berth in the Motor City Bowl. The Zips erased a 14-point deficit in the fourth quarter to beat Northern Illinois in the MAC title game Thursday night, winning on a 36-yard touchdown pass with 10 seconds to play.
And while a Christmas trip to Detroit wouldn’t seem like the ideal holiday venture, it’s of vital importance for a program like Akron, which has never been to a bowl game as a Division I-A school.
Not only will the bowl trip and the MAC title – Akron’s first conference title of any kind – be featured prominently in next year’s media guide and recruiting materials, it will affect this year’s players as well. By qualifying for a bowl, teams get to continue practicing for several more weeks, giving coaches a head start on spring football and preparations for next season.
Akron’s story is hardly unique. Each year, the bowl roster is dotted with teams trying to establish themselves that are thrilled to accept what the power programs would consider “lesser” bowl bids.
In 2005, that list also includes Central Florida, which will play in the Hawaii Bowl one year after finishing 0-11; and Tulsa, which won the Conference-USA title in its first year in the league and earned a berth in the Liberty Bowl against Fresno State.
But there is probably no school happier to be in a bowl of any variety than Rutgers, which last week accepted a berth in the Insight Bowl against Arizona State.It is the first bowl bid for the Scarlet Knights since they opposed the same Sun Devils in the long-defunct Garden State Bowl in 1978.
Rutgers took advantage of a Big East Conference weakened by the departure of three of its best teams to finish 7-4 this season. That mark ends decades of frustration for fans. who looked at the school’s rich tradition (Rutgers beat Princeton in 1869 in the first college football game) facilities, conference affiliation, recruiting base, and academic reputation, and wondered how the football team could turn in one miserable season after another throughout the 1990s.
Rutgers’s inclusion as a charter member of the Big East conference in 1991 was supposed to mean the dawn of big-time football at the state university of New Jersey. The school enjoyed several successful seasons in the 1980s, but was playing a much more regional schedule against smaller schools. Joining the Big East would represent a huge increase in the level of competition. But the payoff never arrived.
Rutgers enjoyed just two winning seasons (6-5 in 1991 and 7-4 in 1992) after joining the Big East. The losing persisted through two failed coaches, Doug Graber and Terry Shea, each of whom promised to turn things around by winning prized local recruits back from Penn State and other top programs in the region.
Turning Rutgers around seemed simple enough: Convince the top local talent to stick around and play at a good school, with good facilities, in a top conference, and on the doorstep of the nation’s largest media market – a market that was allegedly starved for college sports.
But though Rutgers dreamt big, the football program hasn’t always enjoyed the support of the faculty. It seems many felt that becoming a football power would mean a compromise in the university’s solid academic reputation and openly campaigned against efforts to grow the program.
Without much support on campus, neither Shea nor Graber was able to deliver the promised results. The losing continued unabated, and New Jersey recruits continued to flee to other schools. Outside of New Jersey, the school became notorious for football, all right; it became known for having one of the worst teams in America.
It took the arrival of Greg Schiano in 2001 – and a new way of thinking – to begin the resurrection. Like the others before him, Schiano promised to recruit New Jersey, but not right away. A former assistant at Miami, Schiano was present for several pastings of Rutgers and knew he needed to find more speed for the program to compete. He also knew the state of Florida was loaded with strong, athletic high school players who weren’t quite starter material at Miami, Florida, or Florida State. So he set about recruiting Florida aggressively, promising early playing time and a chance to be a part of building a program.
A 2-20 record his first two years improved to 9-14 in years three and four, and Rutgers was no longer steamrolled by every top team it played. With Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech departing the Big East over the past two seasons, the table was set for 1180 1646 1291 1657Rutgers to take the next step – which is exactly what it did by qualifying for the Insight Bowl.
For Schiano, the bowl appearance should make his recruiting pitch a little easier and help to sell the program to the kids in his backyard. It also buys him time with an athletic department that was growing impatient and legitimacy with a faculty that had questioned what results the school was seeing from its efforts to build up the program.
The Insight – with its modest per team payout, still represents a major triumph for Rutgers, which showed this year that it is not yet ready to compete with Louisville and West Virginia for the Big East crown. But in a conference that no longer houses perennial superpowers, Schiano can tell recruits he intends to compete for conference titles and BCS bids – and those recruits might not respond by going to Penn State.
Mr. Levine is a writer for the statistical Web site FootballOutsiders.com.