PISCATAWAY, N.J. — Taking over what was one of the worst offenses in college football last year, Kirk Ciarrocca understands it won’t be easy to turn around Rutgers football. He also knows that the process can’t be forced.

Having spent time earlier in his career at Rutgers (2008 as wide receivers coach, 2009-10 as offensive coordinator), Ciarrocca has a definite understanding of the lay of the land.

He then went on and spent a season at Richmond and then Delaware before moving on to Western Michigan where he spent four seasons and produced some prolific offensive numbers in 2015. Two years later, he was following head coach P.J. Fleck to the Big Ten and Minnesota.

All of which means that Ciarrocca has experience both at Rutgers as well as in the Big Ten (he was also offensive coordinator at Penn State in 2020).

That experience has given him a certain dose of patience as well as an understanding in terms of rebuilding an offense.

When we don’t have success in something, it doesn’t go the way you want it to go, right…we have a choice that we can make, right?” Ciarrocca said on Monday.

“We can focus on all these things that we didn’t have any control over that influenced the outcome, right, or we can sit here and look at these couple of things over here that had we done it differently, we might have given ourselves a better chance.

“We still might have the same outcome but we might have given ourselves a better chance, and after I left here and I had a chance to reflect on things, there’s a couple of things that I learned that I felt like could help me in the future, and they have. I’ve been able to reach back and lean on those things.”

He will have to coach up this current group but also bring in better talent as well. Wide receiver and offensive line are thin and unproven along the two-deep.

One of his first acts as offensive coordinator at Rutgers, in fact, even before he met the current players on the team, was a recruiting event on Sunday. Several dozen recruits visited the Hale Center where they got campus tours as well as visited with coaches, hung out in the players lounge and took in the men’s basketball team’s 68-64 overtime win over Ohio State.

“If you asked me about plays in the basketball game, I probably can’t tell you very much about the actual plays because I was just sitting there, and I was watching the student section and how into the game they were, and the crowd getting on their feet at different times in the game when they needed a defensive stand,” Ciarrocca said.

“I was sitting there: Yes, this is one of the reasons why I came back here is we put that type of product out there in the stadium, that’s what the student section is going to be like out there. That’s what it’s going to be like and that’s what the State of New Jersey is going to be like about Rutgers Football.”