The Rutgers Mess

Thank God this New York Times editorial is coming days before Thanksgiving, when all of us have to hear about Rutgers football from relatives who, frankly, no nothing of the insane waste of resources behind our team's non-meteoric, "You didn't even get what you paid for" rise in the rankings:

Rutgers, the biggest and most important public university in New Jersey, has spent millions of dollars furthering its ambition to become a major football power that might otherwise have been devoted to academics. It has done so during a period of rising tuition and budgetary cutbacks in academic departments, and, worse, without any real oversight from the university’s president, Richard McCormick, and its Board of Governors.

A review committee appointed by Mr. McCormick has now issued a scathing report accusing him of being “too passive in exercising his authority” over the athletic department and football program. The report suggests that he and the board turned a blind eye while the university’s athletic director, Robert Mulcahy, signed the football coach to multimillion-dollar contracts and employed a sports marketing firm that once hired Mr. Mulcahy’s son. It also criticizes a secret side deal engineered by Mr. Mulcahy in which the marketing firm paid the football coach an extra $250,000.

[...] But while Mr. McCormick did not create the mess, he did nothing to clean it up. If he knew what was going on with the football program, he was negligent by not stepping in; if he didn’t know, he should have. This leaves him a choice: put the brakes on the stadium project and immediately clean house at the athletics department or resign and make way for someone who will.

[Thanks, Marcus!]