Greg Schiano was sitting in his Tampa office when he took the phone call that changed everything.

It was Tim Pernetti, his former boss at Rutgers. The athletic director was so excited he was almost out of breath.

"Greg, you're not going to believe this …"

"We did it! We got into the Big Ten!"

Schiano hung up and looked out at the Buccaneers’ practice fields, which were bathing in perfect sunshine. His mood was growing darker by the second.

He had one of the 32 most coveted coaching jobs in football, his reward for turning around a Rutgers program everyone had left for dead. And while the move to the NFL in January 2012 never quite felt right, he believed it was the best decision for his career and for his family.

Until, that is, he took that phone call.

Just eight months after his departure, his dream had happened after all. Schiano did his best to pretend he was excited when Pernetti shared the good news, but the words took the air out of his lungs.

"I just remember sitting at that desk and when I took the call," Schiano said. "I was just" -- he opens his mouth and his eyes as wide as possible -- "and I literally remember saying, 'How did I get to this place? How did this all happen? What I set out to do is done, and I'm not part of it.'"

For the first time, in a wide-ranging 90-minute interview with NJ Advance Media, Schiano explained why he left New Jersey in the first place, what he feared for the program he loved and what it took to finally get him home.

He talked at length about how he plans to approach the job differently this time -- call it Schiano 2.0 -- and how the events from the eight years while he was gone have shaped him as a coach, a father and a man.

“A lot of weird stuff has happened to me since I’ve left Rutgers,” Schiano said. "Well, my beliefs are, they’re not coincidental. Why do I find myself back here? This is where I’m supposed to be.”

Gaining knowledge from failure

He was gone 2,866 days. And still, when you enter the football offices at the Hale Center, it is easy to wonder if he ever left at all.

The bowl trophies -- the ones he helped win -- still greet visitors from under glass display cases as they exit the elevator.

The Block R -- the one he helped design and put on what seemed like a million minivans around the state -- still hangs behind the reception desk.

His predecessor had tried to scrub Schiano from the building, doing everything from rearranging the furniture to replacing many of the people. That purge included, oddly, removing a suit of armor that used to stand in the head coach’s office. Chris Ash wanted it out. But, soon, it will be back.

"We just have to find it," Schiano said.

The familiar faces. The old catch phrases. Things suddenly feel like 2011, when Schiano ruled in Piscataway. That’s a comforting transition for the people around this program who believed its staggering descent began the moment he walked out the door.

But it's clear the time he was away -- the "weird stuff" -- have shaped the man in charge in ways big and small.

As he settled into a leather chair inside his new/old office where the bookcases are still empty and most of the walls blank, the conversation steered to the strange and often challenging time he spent away from this place.

“I think going through some really tough things has opened my eyes to a lot of situations,” Schiano said. “As you gain in knowledge and hopefully some wisdom.”

He said he wanted to talk about the circumstances that led him to leave Piscataway because, he believes, people have misunderstood his motives. The man who once turned down jobs at Miami and Michigan while at Rutgers said he wasn’t trying to climb the coaching ladder or cash-in on a bigger payday.

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Instead, he said, he feared the program he had built in New Jersey looked like it might be left without a chair when the music stopped in college football realignment -- a fate, everyone knew, that would doom any dreams he had of building a national-title contender.

“I think it’s important that people know why I left,” said Schiano, who signed an eight-year, $32-million contract in December. “I was deathly afraid that we were going to be left on the outside.”

Rutgers was among a small group of schools that was vetted for a spot in the Big Ten as early as 2009, multiple sources confirmed. That conference, Schiano believed from the moment he arrived in Piscataway, was where the Scarlet Knights belonged.

But a few months after Nebraska was extended an invitation in 2010, the league issued a blunt statement that it “will not be actively engaged in conference expansion for the foreseeable future.”

Schiano waited two years but the situation did not change. Then, on Jan. 26, 2012, he stunned everyone in Piscataway with his abrupt departure to the NFL -- the only job he had ever taken in his life, he admits now, that he hadn’t prepared extensively before signing the contract.

"I ran from something, not to it," Schiano said. "That was a powerful lesson that I learned. So when I had a chance to come back here? I ran to it."

His time in the NFL was two-year tutorial in what he didn’t know about the professional game. Schiano dealt with a MRSA infection in the team’s locker room, angered a Super Bowl winning coach by having his players crash the victory formation and had a former player describe playing for him “like being in Cuba.”

He was fired after an 11-21 record in Tampa, spent the next two years away from coaching, then landed as Urban Meyer’s chief lieutenant at Ohio State. He wanted to be a college head coach again, so much so that he ignored what was a poor fit in just about every way and accepted the vacant job at Tennessee in November 2017.

That’s when a social media mob seized on the unsubstantiated claims that he knew about Jerry Sandusky’s child sex abuse at Penn State and did nothing. “Schiano covered up child rape” was painted on The Rock, a campus landmark, as Tennessee officials backed out of a memorandum of understanding. Schiano has strongly denied knowing anything about Sandusky’s crimes.

"I felt worse for my family," he said when I asked him how it felt to have his reputation assailed in such a public way. "Think if your kids read what's painted on that rock about their dad. And your wife has to go through that? It's awful. But the reason I don't talk about it and never will, is that they don't deserve it."

His family, he said, still wasn’t quite ready for him to pull up its roots and move to New England after Meyer stepped down at Ohio State. Bill Belichick hired him to be defensive coordinator with the Patriots, but Schiano left after less than two months and went back to Columbus without a job.

He admits that a return to coaching had become an if, not a when.

"This is the first time in my life I didn't do anything with football," he said. "When I got let go in Tampa, I visited 16 different places, I was on sports TV, I was coaching my kids' teams, I tried to fill my days so I was as busy as I was when I was coaching.

"This time? I took up golf again. I played nine holes at night (with his wife Christy) all the time. I didn't know if I was going to coach again, or if I wanted to coach again. I thought I would eventually. Now when this thing opened, I got the itch. I started working on a plan.

"I wanted to do this," he said. "I knew, after this (fall after Ash's firing), this job wasn't opening again any time soon, and I just felt like I was getting a second chance at my dream job. Don't screw it up!"

Building trust, and building a program

Schiano knows there are pitfalls to focusing too much on the past, especially with a generation that thinks an Instagram post from last week is ancient history. Still: He wants his players to know what is possible here, and the best way is to show them.

He gathered them on their first night back before this semester began and showed them parts of the 2006 Louisville game -- the victory that still stands as the program’s high-water mark. He said the players, who have only experienced a half-full (if that) stadium for home games, were floored by clips of the crowd.

"Do you think they have any idea there were 22 sellouts, with 15 in a row, when we had it going here?" Schiano asked. "Think about it. They were 5 or 6. The stadium wasn't done yet. But if you remember on that telecast, they showed the students sleeping out (for tickets) and me handing out pizzas.

"I told them, 'Those guys aren't any different than you. That wasn't the most talented team on the field that night. It wasn't even close! But they do everything we asked.' My whole thing was, 'If we wait around to trust each other, we're going to slow this thing down. But here's a little something to show you that it actually works if you do it the way we tell you.'"

The coach they saw on the TV didn't look much different than the one standing in front of them, other than a few gray hairs on the side of his head.

So is he?

It is easy to focus on the similarities between Schiano 2.0 and the original. Rutgers is still “chopping,” after all, and he is leaning on former assistant coaches and players in more than a dozen different roles as he buzzes around the region recruiting in a helicopter.

And, yes, Schiano is still the guy who will have people scrambling if he doesn’t think the food is good enough for the recruits he has on campus. He even will move back into the same house he built in 2007 for his family a few miles from SHI Stadium, one with 8,000 square feet of space that allows him to hold events for the entire team.

Then you see him march across the court at the Rutgers Athletic Center, as he did at halftime of a recent basketball game against Michigan, to hug Chris Christie. The former governor had ripped Schiano for his contract demands and declared that he’s “not Bear Bryant” when a deal with Rutgers appeared to fall apart this fall.

Does the original Schiano forgive and forget so quickly? Maybe out of necessity, because no one understands how to navigate the only-in-Jersey aspects of this job than he does. But the coach believes that the experiences in 30 years of coaching -- the failures and the setbacks -- have softened some of the edges.

“I’m 53. Who am I trying to impress?” he said. “There’s this image of the ‘big bad wolf.’ If I need to flex to get things done, I’ll flex. Am I less demanding? I don’t think so. Am I’m less competitive? I think I’m more, more driven. But I’m going to enjoy what I’m doing."

He said he was “more like a pinball” in his first go-around, with blinders on as he bounced from one thing to another. Schiano and his first boss, Bob Mulcahy, had to fight for everything back then, from facility upgrades to priority class scheduling for players and, most contentiously, to the stadium’s expansion.

"He's the same person with the same drive -- but with a certain level of maturity that comes from the different experiences he's had," Mulcahy said.

Schiano doesn’t think he’ll face the same struggles to get things done this time. That’s why he fought so hard for facility guarantees and coaching salaries during contract negotiations. He needed to know that the resistance would come from the Big Ten competition, not from within the Rutgers universe.

"There was collateral damage in building this the first time," Schiano said. "Personally. Professionally. The people I cared about.

"We pushed so hard to build this the first go around that some people got ticked off. Some people were offended. Some people didn't have the same vision and they pushed back. People lost their jobs because of that. People lost relationships because of that. But at the end of the day, we're not in the Big Ten if we don't do the things we did."

‘Why not Rutgers? Why not us?’

Regrets? He has a few.

Schiano managed to salvage the 2020 recruiting class in the frenetic weeks after taking the job, but the haul was a far cry from when he was beating out the likes of Ohio State and Notre Dame for talent before he left.

Does he ever wonder what this place might look like if he hadn’t bolted to Tampa eight years ago? If he wasn’t picking up a phone hundreds of miles away when Pernetti found out that the dream of bringing Rutgers to the Big Ten had come true, but working with him every step of the process?

"I've thought about that often, yeah. I think I know exactly how it would be," he said, nodding his head. "Pretty damn good."

He doesn’t say it, but he doesn’t have to: Rutgers wouldn’t be staring at a 3-21 record over the past two seasons, a roster that needs an overhaul and a season-ticket base that is still a fraction of what it was in those glory days.

He can't spend much time looking back given the challenges in front of him. He also isn't worried about damaging the legacy he built the first time around because, well, he doesn't see failure as an option.

The 2,866 days away, the career setbacks and the "weird stuff," none of that has damaged his confidence in himself as a coach, or his belief that Rutgers can win on the highest level. His goals haven't changed. His purpose has.

“I’m here for a reason,” he said. "We have the things you need when you’re going to build a college football program. We have a great recruiting base. We have a huge alumni base. We have a great education. And we have a location with as dense a population as any in the land. If you have those four things, why not?

“Why not Rutgers? Why not us?”

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