Eric LeGrand was telling a story he had told countless times before, about the devastating football collision that left him paralyzed and the man who helped guide him out of the unthinkable darkness.

"I know the man. I played under him. I saw the man after my injury," LeGrand said on Sunday night. "He told me when he recruited me that he treats all of his players like family.

"And after my injury ..."

He paused. LeGrand knew I had heard -- and written -- this story before. Greg Schiano had become a second father to LeGrand when he was paralyzed from the shoulders down after making a tackle in 2010, driving an hour each night after practice to sit bedside during his recovery and make sure his injured player "had the best care in the world."

LeGrand wanted to call Schiano on Sunday night as the disaster unfolded in Tennessee, wanted to find something to say to lift his spirits, but he figured it was useless. The hate-filled mob had gotten to the former Rutgers coach already, taking a snippet of courtroom testimony that amounts to nothing more than hearsay in the Jerry Sandusky case and using it to ruin a man's reputation and maybe his career.

That's the likely outcome of this Tennessee saga. What school is going to hire Schiano now after seeing the reaction in Knoxville? What athletic director is going to risk a scene like this, with fans protesting on campus, and outraged state congressmen demanding answers, and condemnation from the White House press secretary herself?

"Schiano covered up child rape at Penn State," somebody spray painted on a giant rock on campus. Twitter exploded with fury at anyone who even attempted to point out the facts in this case, because let's face it, this is 2017 and those don't matter any more.

Schiano, a Penn State assistant coach from 1990-95, has strongly denied that he knew anything about Jerry Sandusky's reign of terror in State College, Pa. Sandusky, a former Penn State defensive coordinator, was convicted of 45 counts of child molestation in 2012.

But in a court deposition from 2015, Mike McQueary, the former graduate assistant who said he walked in on Sandusky and a boy in the shower, accused Schiano of seeing something similar. He said that information came from another assistant coach, Tom Bradley, in a conversation.

"I can't remember if it was one night or one morning, but that Greg had come into his office white as a ghost and said he just saw Jerry doing something to a boy in the shower," McQueary said. "And that's it. That's all (Bradley) ever told me."

That's it. There were no follow-up questions, no investigation, no police report, no charges filed and no lawsuit seeking damages. No witness ever came forward to make a claim that Schiano -- a prominent coach with a seven-figure income for most of his career -- had done something wrong.

Is it possible that Schiano witnessed Sandusky and a boy in a shower? Yes. But this was absolutely not proven in a court of law, and what McQueary said amounts to nothing more than hearsay.

People who spoke to Schiano in the weeks after that deposition was unsealed in 2016 recount a similar conversation, with Schiano insisting that, had he witnessed anything close to this, he would have put Sandusky through a wall. This fits with his personality.

But the Tennessee mob had siezed on the headline from that story, and Schiano had gone from signing a memorandum of understanding to become the Volunteers head football coach at 2 pm to a social-media punching bag before dinnertime. Tennessee, predictably, backed down.

Let's be clear on what this is really about. The people in Tennessee aren't outraged about what Schiano might have witnessed a quarter century ago when he was a young assistant coach. They were furious over his middling 68-67 record as a head coach in Piscataway and his failed two-year tenure in charge of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

If Schiano was a hot-shot coach headed for the national playoff, you really think those Tennessee fans are spray painting that rock? You think Clay Travis, the backward-thinking professional blowhard in SEC country, is really tweeting out the Tennessee athletic director's cell phone number to the mob if Schiano was head coach of a top-10 team right now?

Of course not. The sad reality is that character should be the one thing we can agree on when it comes to Schiano. He wasn't a perfect coach by any means, but he took the worst college football program in the country and built something Rutgers fans could take pride in, on and off the field.

He might drive you crazy for three hours on Saturday, but in those 11 years he spent in Piscataway, he poured his life into turning that program into a family.

"He made sure I had the best of everything," LeGrand told me Sunday night. "My life was on the line. They want to take him down because of hearsay? It just shows you where the world is going."

LeGrand hopes that Schiano gets another shot at a head coaching job someday, but he knows the damage that the hateful Tennessee mob had done. He watched it unfold with a deep sense of sadness, and not just for the man who helped lead him out of the darkness.

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