I had been hearing bits and pieces here and there about what a great job new Rutgers Coach Greg Schiano did in recruiting this year, and I finally got some time to take a closer look and see what everyone was talking about.

Before I share some of the facts of the Scarlet Knights' recruiting class with you, let me take a second to share that I'm a closet Rutgers fan. Not in a big way, mind you, I would just like to see them improve. Rutgers is the ultimate underdog, in my opinion, and if they could string together a couple of winning seasons and actually go to a bowl, I think it would be a great story. Not to mention that it would be great for the Big East.

In some ways, Rutgers and Virginia Tech are kindred spirits. Like VT, Rutgers has a core group of solid fans. In the last few years, Tech's group has gotten much larger than Rutgers', but still, there is a group of never-say-die fans at Rutgers who support the Scarlet Knights and expect them to do better. Rutgers has very good facilities and a good home state for football recruiting, at least on par with the state of Virginia in high school football talent. In short, much like Virginia Tech was in 1992-93, Rutgers is a football powder keg waiting for someone to light the fuse.

Schiano might just be the guy. Young, dynamic, handsome, and (best of all for Rutgers) a New Jersey native, the 34-year-old Schiano served as the defensive coordinator for the Miami Hurricanes in 1999 and 2000. From 1996-1998, he was with the Chicago Bears as a defensive assistant and defensive backfield coach, and from 1990-1996, he was a defensive backfield coach for Penn State.

When he was hired on December 1, 2000, Schiano vowed to "recruit the State of Rutgers. That's New Jersey and anything you had to drive through New Jersey to get to - and we're going to recruit Florida."

On December 13th, just 12 days later, he had an on-campus meeting with 34 of the top high school players in the state of New Jersey. Most of the recruits he talked to were impressed, and the meeting led to a landslide of New Jersey recruits just a few days later. According to Rivals.com records for Rutgers recruiting, on December 18th and 19th, eight players from the state of New Jersey committed to Rutgers.

The rush of NJ recruits was led by the commitment of Rikki Cook, ranked as the #3 player in the state by SuperPrep. The 6-1, 235 pound Cook was the Gatorade Player of the Year in New Jersey and is the crown jewel of Schiano's first Rutgers recruiting class.

Rutgers signed 20 players: 13 from the state of New Jersey, 7 from Florida, and 1 from Missouri. The number of in-state players was nothing new -- Rutgers signed 12 last year -- but the quality was unprecedented, at least in recent years. The Scarlet Knights landed 11 of the top 34 players in the state of New Jersey according to SuperPrep. To give you some perspective, SuperPrep rated 38 players in the state of New Jersey and 28 in the state of Virginia this year, so landing 11 of the top 34 is roughly equivalent to landing 9 or 10 of Virginia's top 25.

The class of New Jersey kids that Schiano signed looks like the classes of Virginia kids that Frank Beamer built his program on in the early/mid-90's. First of all, he's got a couple of studs. In addition to Cook, Rutgers signed defensive lineman Davon Clark, a 6-3, 260-pounder that SuperPrep rated at #7 in New Jersey.

Think of Cook and Clark as the potential Ken Oxendine and Cornell Brown of this Rutgers recruiting class. Beyond Cook and Clark, Schiano landed the players ranked #20, 21, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34 in New Jersey. Think of that group of guys as the players ranked 15-25 in the state of Virginia that Beamer always fills out his roster with.

If, like Beamer, Schiano can bring along his star recruits and develop some gems among the second-tier guys, he has, for the first time in years at Rutgers, a solid nucleus of guys around which to build a good team.

None of the 7 players that Rutgers signed from Florida were in SuperPrep's top 91 for the state of Florida, but the one player they signed from Missouri, QB Ryan Cubit (6-3, 195), is a real catch. Both SuperPrep and Tom Lemming rated him as the #18 QB in the country, and Rivals.com had him listed as a 3-star player and the #38 QB in the nation.

SuperPrep rated the Rutgers class as the #41 class in the country (#5 in the Big East), PrepStar rated them #49 in the country (#5 in the Big East), and Tom Lemming rated them as the #50 class in the country. Not earth-shattering numbers, but certainly much higher than where Rutgers has been landing the last few years.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the Rutgers recruiting class is how many players Schiano got to decommit from other schools, and how many players he got that didn't even list Rutgers as a favorite until late in the recruiting process.

The biggest example is Cook. Rikki Cook is the brother of former Tech defensive end Ron Cook. Rikki committed to Virginia but backed out of his commitment when Cavaliers' head coach George Welsh retired. Cook attended Schiano's Rutgers meeting and became the first high-profile recruit to commit to the Scarlet Knights. Cook led the wave of December 18-19 recruits that got the Rutgers class off to a rousing start.

Davon Clark, the highly regarded DL, cancelled trips to Ohio State on January 5th and Notre Dame on January 19th and scheduled a trip to Rutgers on January 19th, instead. He must have been impressed, because he committed to Rutgers on January 22nd, the Monday after his trip to Rutgers.

But the story of QB Ryan Cubit is perhaps the most interesting. Cubit is from Hickman, Missouri, and his father Bill was the offensive coordinator for Missouri during the 2000 season. On December 6th, Bill Cubit was named by Schiano as the offensive coordinator at Rutgers.

Four days later, on December 10th, Ryan Cubit committed to Clemson over Purdue and Illinois, without even mentioning Rutgers as being an option. Five weeks later, in the January 15th All-America issue of SuperPrep, Cubit was quoted as saying, "I was trying to be open-minded in the recruiting process, and that's why I took those other trips (to Purdue and Illinois). But no one really had chance against Clemson."

Just ten days after that issue came out, on January 25th, a Cubit decommit was widely rumored, and on January 28th, it was confirmed that he had backed out of his Clemson commitment and was going to follow his father to Rutgers.

I could tell some more stories, but this is TechSideline.com, not RutgersSideline.com. And you get the idea: Greg Schiano is off to a rollicking start at Rutgers. With the Temple Owls getting booted out of the Big East, Rutgers is now the lone weak sister the conference has. UConn enters the league in 2005 and will take over that honor, at least for a while. And if Schiano, who has gotten off to a hot start in recruiting, can follow through in other areas, he will make sure that the Rutgers Scarlet Knights won't be the bottom feeder in the Big East for a long while.

Let's take the SuperPrep, PrepStar and Rivals.com national recruiting rankings for the teams in the Big East football conference and see how they faired.

Things did not go well for the Syracuse Orangemen in recruiting this year. The Cuse usually does pretty well in recruiting, but this year, they suffered the indignity of being ranked #6 in the Big East in recruiting by SuperPrep, PrepStar, and Rivals.com, ahead of only West Virginia and Temple. They failed to get higher than #50 nationally in any of the three recruiting services shown, a rarity for them.

Nationally, Syracuse was ranked #50 by SuperPrep, #54 by PrepStar, and #62 by Rivals.com. The Orangemen are used to sometimes being ranked behind Miami, VT, Boston College, and even Pittsburgh, but to have one of their recruiting classes be unanimously ranked behind that of Rutgers is new and unsettling to the often-vocal Syracuse fans.

Also interesting to note is the disparity in opinion of how Pittsburgh did. Whereas PrepStar and Rivals both list Pitt as having the third-best recruiting class in the Big East, SuperPrep's Allen Wallace doesn�t appear to think much of them, ranking them #44 in the country, or fifth in the Big East.

But that's with a caveat. Those are SP's national rankings, which are the sole opinion of Allen Wallace. Later on in the same issue (SuperPrep's March 9th "Letter of Intent" issue), writer Mike White lists the Big East rankings, and he flip-flops Rutgers and Pitt, ranking Pitt as the #4 class in the Big East, behind Miami, VT, and BC.

I'm not sure what kind of message that sends to have two different rankings in the magazine, but hey, that's Wallace's call. At least the magazine has disclaimers saying the in-conference rankings (by White) may vary from the national rankings (by Wallace).

I continue to be amazed at how big of a star Michael Vick is. Recently, Vick was on the cover of ESPN the Magazine yet again. It was ESPN the Magazine's NFL Draft issue, and it featured a stylized picture of Vick, in his VT uniform, streaking through the air like a bullet, with the notation "Michael 2: Ready or not, here comes Vick."

Inside the magazine are two articles: one about Vick and one about how Virginia Tech is picking up the pieces in the aftermath of his departure.

Someone linked to the cover picture on the message board, and another poster sighed wistfully, "I like seeing Mike still decked in the VT gear." True, and the amount of exposure that Vick's exploits have given to the old "square-root-of-one" logo can never, ever be measured.

Occasionally, I see Vick's likeness appear somewhere, and for a moment, it strikes me just how incredibly huge he is. It's hard to grasp, because he is one of our own, at least as much as a star that big can be "one of us."

But every once in a while, it hits me. Like the other day, when I was cleaning up the "General Interest Sites" section of the Links Page on TSL (man, was that thing horribly out of date!). That section contains links to the big sites like ESPN.com, CBS Sportsline, etc.

As I updated the links, I checked them to make sure they worked. Out of the five links contained there, two of them -- ESPN.com and CNNSI.com -- had pictures of Vick on the home page of their web sites. I'm not talking about their "College Football" or "NFL Draft" subpages. I'm talking about their home pages.

A Virginia Tech athlete on the home page of some of the biggest web sites in existence. It reached out and slapped me for a moment, once again, how big Vick has become, and how much exposure he has given Virginia Tech in the process.

It's almost over. He'll be drafted soon, and not long after that, he'll don a uniform for his new team, and from that point on, that's what uniform people will start to associate him with, not his old maroon and orange Virginia Tech uniform.

As sad as that is, MV has already done way more for promoting the orange and maroon than we ever could have hoped, in just two short years.

The announcement on April 9, 2001 that Rivals.com was going out of business and would be closing up shop filled me with many emotions. None of my reactions were what you would call gleeful, or joyful, or even positive. While most people considered Rivals.com, specifically Screaming Lizard's TechSportsOnline.com web site, to be a competitor to TechSideline.com, I don't think I ever really pictured it that way.

TSL always had much, much more traffic than what Screaming Lizard (SL) had on his Rivals.com site, and SL rarely wrote articles of the length and scope of what you would see on TechSideline.com, written by yours truly or others. He did a better job of covering day-to-day Virginia Tech sports news (I rarely update News and Notes anymore, it seems), and the recruiting database that Rivals provided on his site was pretty awesome, but there wasn't a lot of comparison between the two sites. I didn't think so, anyway.

But let's back up a little bit first. Rivals.com, for those of you who don't know, was a network of hundreds of web sites devoted to college, pro, and even high school sports. From roughly 1998 to 2001, Rivals.com pulled together hundreds of independently run web sites (like HokieCentral.com) into one vast, uniform "network" of web sites. The idea was one-stop shopping for any pro or college team you might want to check up on, or find a message board for.

It worked like this: Rivals.com would sign a webmaster to an "affiliate agreement." Affiliate agreements were two or three years in length, and in exchange for ad revenue sharing, Rivals.com would host the site for free. When you moved your site over to Rivals.com, you would have to fit your site into their standard template or format.

Every Rivals.com web site looked the same -- only the colors and a key home page graphic were different from site to site. That's because Rivals.com is a database-driven network with a standard format, and all you have to do to create a new web site is to specify colors, a name, and a graphic, among other things, and you're ready to go. When it came time to post a new article, webmasters wouldn't manipulate the site itself. They would just enter their new article into a database, set some key parameters, and the article would appear on their web site.

Different webmasters had different deals with Rivals. In the case of their heavy-hitting recruiting analysts like Jeremy Crabtree or Bobby Burton of Rivals100.com, Rivals actually bought out their web sites and signed them to an employment contract.

But most webmasters just signed the affiliate agreement described above, without actually selling their web sites to Rivals. The webmaster would get free hosting and a database-driven article entry system, and in exchange, Rivals.com would share with the webmaster whatever advertising revenue was received. It was a no-cost solution for the webmaster that would hopefully bring in some cash.

Rivals.com contacted me, of course (it seems they contacted everyone who had an independent web site), and wanted me to sign an affiliate agreement with them. This was back in the spring/summer of 1999, back when TSL was called HokieCentral.com. Their offer was pretty simple: they were offering me a $20,000 signing bonus and something like half of the ad revenue received on the site in exchange for agreeing to be a Rivals.com site for three years.

I remember they were very nice. I heard many stories about them not being so nice, saying things to prospective webmasters like, "You better sign up with us, because if you don�t, we're just going to bury you," but they never said anything like that to me.

I don�t remember the sales guy who was recruiting me for Rivals, but I do remember having extensive conversations with Bobby Burton, one of Rivals' top recruiting coverage guys, who worked on Rivals100.com. Bobby had the annoying habit of saying, "You know what I'm saying?" over and over in his conversations, but other than that, he was an okay guy and was very excited about being onboard with Rivals. I doubt he's excited now.

To be honest, I didn't think about it very long. The $20k sounded nice, but I did not care for the standardized Rivals.com format one bit, and I knew that my readers didn't either. Devotees of HC/TSL are a fickle lot, particularly those that use the message board heavily. They like the site the way it is, and changes are not well-received. Especially changes that would move the site to an inferior format.

Not that I'm snobby about it. TSL is a pretty good-looking site these days, but it's nothing that will knock your socks off, and that was especially true back in mid-1999. I've always been a substance-over-style type of guy. But even though HC wasn't the world's most beautiful web site, it was still superior to the standard Rivals.com format, and the message board system was superior, too. Not to mention a million times faster, which is a big key when you're trying to sift through the messages on the ultra-busy TSL board.

I knew that if I switched to Rivals, my users would revolt. And I liked the creative control I had over the look of my web site. So, $20,000 signing bonus or not, I politely told Rivals.com no. Several times. They finally got the message and went away.

Shortly after my final "no," they signed up Screaming Lizard, and he opened up shop at virginiatech.rivals.com. I always thought SL was Rivals.com's backup plan for a VT web site, but in a recent article he wrote, SL talked about being contacted by Rivals as far back as 1998, long before they ever called me for the first time. It doesn't really matter to me whether I was option A or option B.

Rivals.com went on to grow and grow and grow. They threw many, many, many $20,000-type signing bonuses at many webmasters, and their fiscal irresponsibility, along with a bad advertising-based business plan, finally did them in.

Over the course of their existence, Rivals.com received approximately $75 million in enthusiastic venture capital, and they once had a plan for taking their network public and selling stock. But they bled money badly. In the year 2000 alone, they spent $21 million of the cash they had received, while bringing in just $1 million in revenue. They had a big office in Seattle, and their payroll alone was $7 million. So their failure and bankruptcy is no surprise.

I never had a good feeling about them, their web site format, or their business plan, but nonetheless, their demise fills me with a tinge of sadness. Another major player on the Internet has fallen, and this one isn't an on-line toy store or an on-line pet supply store. It's a sports content provider, just like me. That hits a little too close to home for me to take any joy in it.

Plus, I had gotten used to Rivals. They were well-known and provided a lot of stability in Internet sports coverage. Their web sites always provided easy-to-find links for any opponents the Hokies might be getting ready to tee it up with. Looking for an Akron Zips web site? Try akron.rivals.com. Western Michigan? Go to westernmichigan.rivals.com. They weren't the best sites in the world, but you could always find them.

And their recruiting coverage was killer. We relied heavily on the seemingly endless parade of Rivals.com recruiting "gurus" during the past year to help us keep our TSL football recruiting database up to date and well-supplied with information. Their recruiting rankings were great food for thought, and their on-line database was far above what anyone else had ever offered on the web.

Now they're gone. Anarchy reigns again on the Internet, and the shakeout continues. Many of the webmasters will quit, a lot of them will start up new sites that will be harder to find, no doubt, and the rest will piddle around trying to find direction. Many of the Rivals.com webmasters who have been cut loose have contacted us to ask about hosting opportunities. Sorry folks, we're in a scramble to get profitable ourselves, so we can't help.

The devil we knew has been replaced with a devil we don't know. Part of me is pleased for having the wisdom and foresight to turn them down when they made their tempting five-figure offer, but another part of me shudders at the thought that I might have made a mistake and gone with them, had I been in a different mood when I was dealing with them.

So while I'm satisfied with the course of action I chose, I'm sad because Rivals.com has flamed out. A lot of people put a lot of time, effort, and money into that ill-fated venture. But the people I feel for the most are the webmasters who have suddenly been cut loose and have to figure out where they go from here. I wish them all the best.

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