Mike Rice and The Culture of College Sports

Rutgers former head coach Mike Rice

The Mike Rice incident at Rutgers has brought a lot of attention to college sports (Read more about indcident here) and how coaches might mistreat students. 

But this speaks to a bigger problem in college sports. The culture of college sports has given all the power to the schools and coaches at the expense of the college athlete.

Although Rutgers fired Mike Rice, the former head basketball coach, the damaged caused by this was already done. The incident took place in December and everyone in the Rutgers' sports department including the athletic director and the president of the school agreed to suspend Rice for 3 games and levied a $50,000 fine. But they waited until they received some bad publicity over the last few days to fire him.

The fact that they fired the former director of player development, Eric Murdock, once he blew the whistle on Rice's behavior in practice shows that they didn't care about the players. If they truly cared about players safety they would have launched an investigation in early July when they found out. 

This is a reoccurring theme in college sports where the school's put their athletic department's first before anything. This happened with Penn State in the Sandusky trial and at Texas tech with Mike Leach. The Leach case was handled a lot faster but how much of that was because the complain kid's dad was an analyst for ESPN? 

The Rutgers situation sent a message that if your going to speak out against something wrong you could still lose your job. Their firing of Murdock is a reminder of the decision someone in his position must make. Whether they want to speak out and risk losing their job or keep their head down and do the wrong thing. 

The president of Rutgers Robert Barchi released this statement earlier today:

Rutgers Athletic Director Tim Pernetti

"Rutgers University has a long and proud history as one of the nation’s most diverse and welcoming academic institutions. Coach Rice’s abusive language and actions are deeply offensive and egregiously violate the university’s core values."
 But he signed off on the athletic director Tim Pernetti's decision to only suspend Rice for 3 days. He said that he knew about the incident but hadn't actually seen it. If you are the president of a school you need to know more about issue like this. That just means that he would not have fired Rice is there weren't any media scrutiny.

Athletes should be assured that things like this can't happen with out consequences. Instead in this instance they learned that it will only be dealt with if the university fails to keep it out of the media spot light. 

If a coach that has a 44-51 overall record and has never won more than 15 games in a season can get away with something like this for 3 months than who knows how a long a winning coach could get away with it. 

The President of the school does not need to get fired but he needs to take this as a sign that he needs to be more involved with whats going on at his school. Tim Pernetti should be fired for being naive about the impact the abuse could have on players. 

This type of thing could make it very hard for a player to speak out. It is already hard when scholarships are renewed on a 1 year basis. An athlete can be cut from a team at any point for speaking out. That is why none of the players on the team reacted to the abuse and didn't speak out.

In a world where colleges make billions of dollars of athletes and don't pay them at all. Coaches like Steve Alford sign 10 year contracts and leave their former players and recruits in the dust. Coaches can leave whenever they want but players can get blocked from transferring to certain places and have to sit out a year.

Players are already being abused by the NCAA system, schools could at least try to protect them from being abused by their coaches.