As far as football and men’s basketball go, Rutgers University has never been a national powerhouse. Between 1978 and 2005, Rutgers failed to qualify for a bowl game. For football, Rutgers joined The Big East Conference in 1991 and they were not relevant in the conference until 2004 when Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College all left for The Atlantic Coast Conference. Basketball wise Rutgers has been an afterthought as they have failed to make The NCAA Tournament since 1991 as they could not hang in The Big East with traditional powers such as Syracuse and Connecticut. Now as Rutgers prepares to embark on The Big Ten Conference in 2014, a tough task just got tougher with the scandal involving former Rutgers men’s basketball head coach Mike Rice.
Rice was fired this week after ESPN’s Outside The Lines produced a video which showed Rice physically reprimanding his players and verbally abusing them. The video was produced in December and former Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti did suspend Rice for three games, but the scandal cloud caught up to Pernetti as he resigned today.
Basketball wise, The Big Ten is tired of taking a backseat to The Big East and The ACC which means that national powers such as Ohio State and Michigan State will not feel any sympathy for Rutgers when they compete against them. Football wise, The Big Ten is trying to catch up to The Southeastern Conference and teams such as Ohio State and Michigan will not throttle down to third gear for the school from Piscataway.
Rutgers school officials led by school president Robert Barchi must now find a new athletic director and men’s basketball coach in order to have a chance in The Big Ten. When Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany swooped in with a pocket full on money to lure Rutgers to The Big Ten, he did it for The New York City media market, not because Rutgers was a power in either football or men’s basketball which are the two money makers in collegiate athletics.
In football, Rutgers has never been able to seal off New Jersey in order to keep the top high-school talent in the state. Current National Football League players such as Greg Olsen and Brian Cushing went to bigger schools known for football. Before transferring to Miami, Olsen enrolled at Notre Dame while Cushing went to The University of Southern California. As far as basketball, Rutgers was never able to tap into the heavily contested high-school basketball scene in New York City or New Jersey as they consistently lost out to other Big East schools on talent. Aside from now asking student-athletes that will attend Rutgers to travel to The Midwest, the school must also find a way to establish a tradition to avoid becoming an afterthought in The Big Ten. When it rains it pours as Rutgers is now finding out.
Leave A Comment