The Greg Schiano Connection: West Virginia and Other Schools that Beat Him To a Pulp

Greg Schiano loves players that beat the crap out of his teams. That's my working hypothesis: if he sees a player beat him up, then he wants that player on his own team. Enter: cornerback Keith Tandy and linebacker Najee Goode, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fifth- and sixth-round draft picks this year. Both of them come out of West Virginia. Key West Virginia University statistic: Greg Schiano is 0-11 vs West Virginia. That school stomped him into the ground in college.

More proof: not only did he draft those two West Virginia players, he signed TE Tyler Urban out of WVU as an undrafted free agent. In addition, he brought in another West Virginia player in tryouts: longsnapper Cody Nutter. There are some other teams that beat Rutgers constantly the past few years. There's Cincinnati, which beat Rutgers in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The quarterback of that team: Zach Collaros - and the Bucs signed him as an undrafted free agent. Greg Schiano on Collaros: he's a winner. Yup. Finally, Schiano lost to North Carolina three tiems the last four years. The team has four North Carolina players in for tryouts.

That's how college coaches work when they come into the NFL. They don't just bring in their own guys, although Schiano has done a little bit of that, but they bring in the guys that beat them - or the players that turned them down at some point. Like Lavonte David, who was recruited out of high school by Greg Schiano but never played for him. You saw some of that with Raheem Morris, who occasionally talked about knowing a rookie from recruiting him his one year in college. Pete Carroll has done the same thing in Seattle, bringing in players that beat him or ignored him during the recruiting process.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, this gives the coaches a good idea of how they would use a player to maximize his strengths. Sometimes, though, it is little more than bias. This is nothing to worry about for now. Start worrying when you see players like that get on the field, and then perform worse than the players they're supplanting. As long as that doesn't happen, this is little more than a curious factoid.