SCARLET FEVER: Scott Vallone (94) was recruited in 2008 by Rutgers assistant Kyle Flood, who has since taken over the head-coaching position. Together, they have Rutgers within a win of its first BCS bowl. (Getty Images)
SCARLET FEVER: Scott Vallone (94) was recruited in 2008 by Rutgers assistant Kyle Flood (inset), who has since taken over the head-coaching position. Together, they have Rutgers within a win of its first BCS bowl. (
)
PISCATAWAY — We need to go back to when this all started, when a player and a coaching staff entered into a promise, a vow unknown to each other.
This doesn’t happen as much as it should in college sports, so we should savor it.
Let’s go back to the fall of 2008. Then Rutgers coach Greg Schiano and his right-hand man, Kyle Flood, are sitting in the stands at Hofstra Stadium watching St. Anthony’s of Long Island dismantle Mount Saint Michael Academy in the CHSFL AAA championship game.
“Mount ran the option, and I had never seen a defensive tackle dominate an option team from that position,’’ Flood, who took over as head coach this season after Schiano left for the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, told The Post.
“I looked at Greg and he said, ‘We got the right guy.’
“And it was strange because we said almost the exact same thing at the same time, ‘We’ve got to do right by him.’ ”
Little did they know Scott Vallone, who chose Rutgers over Boston College by one link in yardage chain, had come to an eerily similar conclusion.
“Coach Schiano sold me on his vision of this program, a vision of a championship program,’’ Vallone told The Post. “I saw what Rutgers could become. And I wanted to help make that happen.’’
When Vallone takes the field tonight in Piscataway (7:30 p.m., ESPN) he will play in his 50th consecutive game, an unheard of streak for an interior lineman.
Should Rutgers (9-2 overall, 5-1 in the Big East) beat Louisville (9-2, 4-2), it will claim the school’s first outright Big East football championship and play in its first major bowl game — either the Orange or Sugar.
“When you sign a kid like that, yeah, he’s making a commitment to you but you’re making a commitment to him, too,’’ Flood said. “I can tell you this, 10, 20 years from now, I’m going to know when Scott gets married, when he has his first kid.’’
It almost didn’t pan out this way. When Vallone — a 6-foot-3, 275-pound senior from Central Islip — got to Rutgers in the summer of 2008, he arrived with a foot injury. He fought through it, playing in the first two games. Rutgers could have squeezed half a season out of him, but that wouldn’t have been upholding the vow.
Vallone had surgery. Fifty games later he has become everything Schiano and Flood envisioned — an elite FBS-level defensive tackle.
“He sets the standard for toughness,’’ said Flood, the lead recruiter on Vallone who has a framed picture of himself and his star tackle taken in 2008 on the bookcase in his office.
Rutgers needs a big game out of Vallone and the defense. Louisville is an explosive team led by dynamic quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, who will try to go with a broken left wrist and a badly sprained right ankle.
Vallone remembers the last time Rutgers and Louisville played with this much on the line. It was 2006 and the Cardinals came to New Jersey with a No.3 national ranking.
They surged to a 25-7 lead before Rutgers rallied for a 28-25 win when Jeremy Ito kicked a last-second field goal. Thousands of red-clad fans stormed the field, an image for the ages.
“I was at home,’’ Vallone said. “We had a game Friday and my dad wanted to go. I had to get my rest. I didn’t know what happened until Dad woke me the next morning. [Tonight] is this team’s chance to make a memory.’’