The real danger inherent in the eye of the endless hurricane of advice the denizens of the bulletin-board jungle keep offering the Rutgers Board of Governors in its search for a football coach is that somebody might actually pay attention to them.

That’s why the opposition to the potential hiring of Greg Schiano from some of them puzzles me. If they care about the program, the university and the kids in it, you have to wonder if they really know what a coach is.

I recall a night when I was sitting in press row at Madison Square Garden between games of a college doubleheader when Joe Lapchick, retired some years earlier at the St. John’s, walked past and a former player sitting next to me jumped up and hugged him.

“Coach,” he said, “so great to see you again.”

The moment was genuine. It set me to thinking. Coach — what does the word really mean? Does it have to be earned? Do all ex-players continue to use it? Does it have an expiration date? Why do some players say it 10 years later when they see him while others walk in the opposite direction? It’s a simple word that carries an implied “Thank you” within it.

What gives a man the right to the title?

Eric LeGrand knows: “A coach is supposed to take you from a boy to a man,” he once said. “He is responsible for the person we change into. That’s what Coach Schiano still does for me. He will always be my coach.”

Sameeh McDonald knows: “I lived through a 2-9 season and an 1-11," he said. "I always believed we’d get there. It was tough, but he taught us (after all those losing years) to stop looking over our shoulders. He gave us a swagger, and we went to the Insight Bowl, and I remember the next day when it was over, I thought we were the beginning of a program. We started something.”

That’s a hell of a lot more than X’s and O’s. I’m thinking about the horrendous night just when it looked as though Rutgers finally had turned the corner. Three of Schiano’s starting defensive backs were injured by a wrong-way driver. One of them, Dondre Asberry, almost died.

Schiano took his co-captains to the hospital and made a pledge to them. He would be there every night at the bedside, catch a few hours of sleep and be back in the office that morning. He did it every night until Asberry was released.

Later he told me: "I try to live for an audience of One, and I know that’s going to be right for Rutgers, for me and for my family … an Audience of One."

He believes the One he spoke of was in that hospital room the night he held hands with the imam who was Asberry’s spiritual counsellor and prayed for Dondre Asberry. It was the same when LeGrand took the hit that paralyzed him.

The team Schiano inherited at Rutgers had just one player who had been actually offered a Division I scholarship from some other school. This is what he told his coaches when they went out to recruit for him that first year:

"You see his principal and his guidance counselor. If one of them tells you he is supposed to be in Room 228 for English and he’s not there, forget him. If they come here, they will have to meet with their position coach once a week and discuss their grades and what they need help with.

“And if you want to find out about them after they get here, don’t talk to the athletic director, talk to the janitor and talk to the lady who serves on the food line. They’ll know who they really are.”

All of that tells you a coach is about being a teacher, role model, disciplinarian, counselor and a friend who will know more about his kids. But it only helps if you can coach.

He came to Rutgers and took over the absolute worst football program in America. With almost nothing to work with, it took four years for it to become respectable. Do not forget that this is Rutgers, a distinguished university that justifiably prides itself on its academic respectability. It is worth noting that during one five-year run, they were near the top of America’s football teams in the NCAA’s academic progress rate statistics, including a first and a second place. Nobody in his program was enrolled in Basket Weaving 101 or Playground Games.

You want to measure the real meaning of the word “coach,” look past the crowds, the bands and the bowls and think about something Schiano told me long ago:

"Football is the vehicle, but I believe that the title ‘coach’ has to be earned. It’s the job of a coach to impart lessons, to teach togetherness and dedication. Think about it. Think about how I feel when a kid from the Essex County suburbs and a kid from [a poor Florida town] can become teammates and call each other on the phone years after football is over for them.

“That’s the bonus a real coach gets, not how many kids we send to the NFL.”

He knows the territory. He’s done it before. What’s the hold up?

Jerry Izenberg is Columnist Emeritus for The Star-Ledger. He can be reached at jizenberg@starledger.com