For decades now, the tweed-jacket detractors at Rutgers have demanded that their university give up on big-time athletics. Go back to playing Lafayette and Lehigh, they’d rail after every blowout. Stop wasting money on a losing football program that is clearly out of its league. Just give up already.

Turns out, all these years later, they were right. Rutgers doesn’t belong in the Big Ten. It doesn’t have the stomach for big-time athletics. It is a small-thinking, decrepit corner grocery store run by incompetent middle managers trying to compete in a world with Walmart and Target, doomed to fail before it even opens its doors to customers.

That’s the reality in the wake of the stunning news that it couldn’t reach an agreement with Greg Schiano to resuscitate its embarrassing football team. Patrick Hobbs and Greg Brown, the Abbott and Costello team running this search, had two months to hammer out a deal with the one candidate who could light a fire under this fan base and finally stop the parade of New Jersey’s best recruits from leaving the state.

Any hope of that ended on Sunday afternoon when, after two weeks of haggling behind the scenes, Schiano withdrew his name from consideration. It is telling that, within minutes, a national website had a story had a “source” doubting whether or not the 53-year-old New Jersey native was “all-in” for the job.

“You can’t take this position with ‘the glass is half empty’ culture. Rutgers fans deserve more,” that source told Brett McMurphy of The Stadium.

Can you imagine? After four years of watching a football team that can barely tie its laces properly, someone in the athletic department -- and we can all take a wild stab at who that someone is -- would have the audacity to suggest that Schiano is the one bringing the glass-half-empty view? The glass isn’t half empty, folks. It’s shattered on the ground, scarring the feet of anyone who walks near it.

Schiano, according to multiple sources familiar with the Nov. 5 meeting between the two sides, came armed with a scouting report of the current roster that stunned people in the room and a list of more than 100 potential targets in the transfer portal to jumpstart the rebuild. He had already started recruiting, behind the scenes, to salvage a 2020 class that looks like a hopeless cause now.

Now Rutgers is going to try to smear him by insisting that he would have walked away like he did after a few months with the New England Patriots, that he was too negative with his criticism of a program on a 20-game Big Ten losing streak, that, besides, he was asking for soooo much. It’s nonsense.

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Schiano did not make over-the-top demands. He didn’t set the market for a Big Ten head coach. That eight-year, $32-million salary that’s giving everyone sticker shock would have landed him in the bottom quarter of conference salaries. That $7.5 million pool for assistant coaches and football-office staff is still a full $5 million less than Ohio State and Penn State. He was taking things off the table over the past two weeks, two sources confirmed, not making additional demands.

He wasn’t worried about padding his bank account. He wanted assurances that he would have the facilities, the infrastructure and the resources he needed to win. Rutgers fans deserve more, that anonymous source insists, but the team will always compete with less, less, less.

You know what Rutgers fans deserve? A real athletic director, that’s what, not one who fought hiring the best available candidate because it would diminish his own star power in Piscataway. Hobbs was too consumed by his own trailer-park-sized ego to consider bringing anyone here who would challenge his standing and take any control of his underachieving department, so he fought this every step of the way.

But, hey, give the guy credit. He won a power struggle despite the football dumpster fire of his creation, an investigation into abuse allegations in his softball program and potty-mouth tongue-lashing of a reporter that led multiple state lawmakers to call for his job. Now the boosters are jumping overboard, too. Rutgers picked a lame duck AD over the long-term solution for its football program, which gives new meaning to the phrase Rutgers gonna Rutgers.

This isn’t all on Hobbs. This was Greg Brown’s baby, too. Brown, the Motorola CEO and Board of Governors leader, loves to play the role of the generous benefactor, but if our very own T. Boone (Slim) Pickens wanted to get this deal done he’d have gotten his hands dirty. He’d have found the BOG votes. He’d have opened his own wallet. But now he can slink back to his corner office in Chicago and try again in three years.

It is the beaten-down alums, and New Jersey overall, that have to live with the embarrassment. The men who hired Chris Ash will now enter the Plan B phase with B-List candidates like Chris Creighton, Anthony Campanile and Jedd Fisch. Maybe Butch Jones will get another call, but what real coach with options will see what happened and risk his career? And does it matter? The fan base, the high school coaches, the recruits --they’re all going to feel like Rutgers is settling for second rate.

The only winners are the athletics haters who tsk-tsk-tsked as Rutgers tried to compete with other similar universities in the college football arms race. They were mostly silent a decade ago when Schiano had this program winning bowl games, but now, they will crawl out of the woodwork and tell the world that Rutgers should have just stuck to playing Lafayette and Lehigh and given up this fruitless pursuit.

Good luck trying to tell them that they’re wrong.

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Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevePoliti. Find NJ.com on Facebook.