The Rutgers Thing

Fire everybody.

The more I read and see about this mess, the more I think that might just be the best possible solution here.  Obviously, you fire the Coach.  You should have fired him when you first saw this footage which, ridiculously enough, was way back in December when nobody knew or cared.  (Sorry, but Rutgers is fighting I don't know how many sports teams for coverage out there.  The fact this slipped under the radar for as long as it did only undermines the somewhat shakey argument that Rutgers deserved inclusion in the B1G because it 'get us NYC.'  It also doesn't help when your basketball team isn't up to much, winning wise.)

Oh, there's also an underling that thinks that verbally and physically abusing players is fine and dandy?  Fire him too.

Maybe you let your Athletics Director resign.   I would have been tempted to go for the Trifecta and fire him as well, but by all account, Tim Pernetti is a decent enough fellow.  He scored Rutgers an invite to the B1G which was a neat trick and one that'll be making your Athletics Department a shit ton of money (supposedly) once you join.   You also let him resign because the idiotic attempt to 'rehabilitate' the Coach was just that.  Idiotic.  If there's video of anything like this, it was bound to get out.  They can't have been silly enough to think that it wouldn't get out- and that when it did come out, the reaction was going to be what they expected.  Making like a Tammy Wynette song to 'stand by your man' when the reputation of the school and program was at stake was idiotic.  And so you let the AD fall on his own grenade.   Boom goes that dynamite.

Where things get dicey is the cover-up.  And there was a cover-up.  Not like a Penn State cover-up or a Watergate cover-up but they decided to rehabilitate this guy and keep on keeping on despite having seen this footage for themselves.   What the hell any of them were thinking is beyond me- which brings us to Rutgers University President Robert Barchi.

Yeah, fire him too. 

I get that basketball coaches can get a little crazy-  having been to a few Iowa games of both the latter days of the House of Lickliter and the start of the Fran McCaffery Era the contrast between the professorial, demure style of Lickliter and the full bore occasional Fran-Hulk rage eruptions of McCaffery is palpable.  But the key word with McCaffery is 'occasional.'  He's got fire in his belly and a will to win and if he's got to get in the faces of his team now and again to motivate them, he will.  He controls his Inner Hulk and uses it as a motivational tool more than anything else.  Fran's destroyed one unfortunate chair so far.  He hasn't thrown any and I would be downright shocked if he physically laid a hand on any of his players. 

There's crazy and then there's assholic.  This Coach?  Total asshole. And an abusive one at that--  even Hoosier fans could only tolerate so much of Bobby Knight throwing chairs and raging out before he was shown the door.  (Winning national titles for a program tends to buy you some leeway with the lunacy but there are limits.)  This Coach went way beyond any raging loony basketball coach I've ever seen.   The appropriate people at Rutgers knew.  And they didn't do much.

And that's inexcusable to me.  After Penn State (which is on a total different level than this-  totally different.  Way worse.) you would have thought that universities across the country would have learned that sunshine is the best disinfectant.  Transparency, especially when you're dealing with people's kids- college aged or not, should be the watch word and you should never, ever, ever cover anything up.  Ever.  Now the the footage is out, it looks like Rutgers was caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar trying to cover this up and you've got a mess on your hands.   If the President of Rutgers still has a job by next week, I'll be surprised.  Given the reputation of Governor Chris Christie as being a tough-talking, no nonsense type of guy, I think once he's got all the details in front of him the decision will be an easy one to make.

In the meantme, you've got a program rocked by scandal and you need someone to clean it up.  That's going to be hard sell in the rapidly rotating world of the coaching carousel.  Whomever ends up as the new Rutgers AD should take solace that you've already got a Hall of Fame Coach on staff and hired.  I doubt she'd want to double up and Coach both teams (if you can't hire a Coach by October, you're in some serious doo-doo) but if anyone is up for the challenge, I think it could be Coach Stringer.  At the very least give her a call and ask for her advice.   If this Coach didn't know how to run a program, she, at least does.