CHIA-NO THANKS
VOLS RETRACT DEAL WITH FORMER RUTGERS CO OACH AFTER BACKLASH
T DIDN’T matter that there was no proof, that the allegations — more than 20 years old — were unsubstantiated, that there never were charges of any sort brought.
Tennessee fans were furious with the hiring of Greg Schiano, and they made enough noise, created enough chaos, threw enough nasty accusations at him on Twitter to force their athletic department to kill the deal.
In a matter of hours, Schiano landed an SEC headcoaching job, had his name dragged through the mud for his connection to Jerry Sandusky and lost that job. Schiano allegedly was connected to Sandusky and the Penn State child sex abuse scandal because he was an assistant coach at the school in the 1990s.
On Sunday evening, ESPN reported Tennessee had backed out of a memorandum of understanding with Schiano, an unprecedented move after initially coming to an agreement to hire the Ohio State defensive coordinator and former Rutgers and Buccaneers head coach.
Their decision was in direct response to an all-out fan revolt over the hire that included several Tennessee politicians who either went on Twitter or released statements to voice their displeasure. Opponents cited Schiano’s time at Penn State, where he worked under Sandusky, who was convicted of child molestation in 2012, and the accusation Schiano saw Sandusky acting inappropriately with a child and said nothing about it. There was a protest on Tennessee’s campus. An iconic rock on which students frequently paint different messages featured the line: “Schiano covered up child rape at Penn State.”
State Rep. Eddie Smith tweeted “a Greg Schiano hire would be anathema to all that our University and our c o mmuni t y stand for.” Tennessee state Rep. Jeremy Faison said: “We don’t need a man who has that type of potential reproach in their life as the highest-paid state employee.”
Suddenly, Tennessee athletics is the face of morality, a school that agreed to a $2.48 million settlement of a federal lawsuit after a group of women sued the university for how it handled allegations of sexual assault by its student-athletes.
There is no proof Schiano knew of Sandusky’s behavior. It’s secondhand hearsay in the wake of a 2015 deposition by whistleblower and former Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary, the star witness in the criminal trials against Sandusky. He claimed, during a civil suit between Penn State and its insurance company over the liability of payouts to Sandusky victims in 2015, that assistant coach Tom Bradley said Schiano went to him in the early 1990s “white as a ghost and said he just saw Jerry doing something to a boy in the shower.” That was it in the transcripts released in 2016. Schiano’s name never came up in any of the interviews McQueary did with law enforcement.
Schiano denied the accusations. Bradley’s lawyers also denied it. Schiano never has faced any charges. The story didn’t surface in Penn State’s internal investigation, run by former FBI director Louis Freeh. Schiano never has been sued by any victims for not reporting the abuse. No one, besides McQueary, has said Schiano witnessed an inappropriate act, and McQueary never saw it for himself.
But Tennessee fans went after Schiano, most likely because they didn’t want him to be their next coach because they have an out-of-touch view of their program.
The Volunteers last won doubledigit games in 2007. They last won 11 games in a season in 2001, their last top-10 finish. Their record over the previous 10 seasons is a woeful 64-63. You know what program that’s similar to? Rutgers, which is 63-65 in that span.
Tennessee needed Greg Schi- ano, who went 68-67 in 11 seasons as Rutgers’ coach from 2001-11, guiding the Scarlet Knights to six winning campaigns and six bowl games in his last seven seasons there, turning around what can be described only as a floundering program. Instead, its delusional fan base did all it could to prevent him from getting the job, relying on a what amounts to a nasty rumor against Schiano.
Maybe next time the school’s athletic department should tweet out potential hires just to make sure its fans are on board. by Zach Braziller