Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Greg Schiano's decision to blitz New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning on a Week 2 kneel-down play spurred a national debate.
Schiano was defiant in an NFL Network interview that will air on "First on the Field" and "GameDay Morning" on Sunday, telling Melissa Stark that he would call the play again. Schiano said he believes the only "unwritten rule" in the NFL is winning.
A lot of other folks in the NFL feel differently. Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports wrote a compelling piece in which executives around the NFL express problems with Schiano's approach. In fact, they had problems with Schiano before he ever entered the league.
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"In conversations with nearly a dozen NFL general managers, personnel executives, scouts and coaches familiar with Schiano's time at Rutgers, I detected an almost unprecedented degree of resentment and disdain for a man who has yet to coach his third professional game," Silver wrote. The words "self-centered autocrat" are used.
"It's his way or (expletive) you," one veteran NFL coach told Silver. "He needs to back up a little bit, or he's going to have a very hard time in this league over the long haul."
Schiano and his Rutgers staff apparently upset a wide swath of NFL folks for how they were treated on visits. More than one GM said he'd never work with Schiano because of how he acted as the Scarlet Knights' coach.
"He's been perceived as a bully in the NCAA, and he's still trying to bully," an NFC executive said. "This league has little patience with that. It won't fly. And even before this, the NFL's scrutinizing eyes were already upon him."
Schiano apparently went out of his way to make NFL personnel's life difficult when they visited Rutgers.
"(Schiano) tried so hard to be a hard ass and went out of his way to be rude," one AFC team's top personnel executive told Silver. "When you'd pass him in the hallway, you might say, 'Good morning,' and he'd look at you like you're a (expletive) idiot. A guy like him doesn't realize that probably half of us played the game at a really high level -- it's completely condescending. He would go out of his way to make you feel as uncomfortable as he could."
Schiano might not win any popularity contests around the NFL, but perhaps that's not such a bad thing. The league is better with big coaching personalities.
We'll take a coach who doesn't care what his colleagues think over another milquetoast drone any day.
Follow Gregg Rosenthal on Twitter @greggrosenthal.
