COOKEVILLE, Tenn. -- This is what freedom looks like for Hayden Rettig: A rest stop of a town in the middle of Tennessee, at an off-the-radar program in the shadow of the state's college football behemoth that rarely comes close to filling its 16,000-seat stadium.
And he couldn't be happier.
"I really can't wait to play," Rettig told me last week from a taco joint not far from his new campus at Tennessee Tech, even though -- as any Rutgers fan knows all too painfully -- the one thing that he has done in college football is wait and wait and WAIT.