Rutgers 37, Kansas State 10…we know you want to talk about RU’s victory last night. If you missed the game, watch the highlights on YouTube.
— Above, Head coach Greg Schiano hugs Rutgers wide receiver Willie Foster. Photo by Andrew Mills, courtesy of The Star Ledger.
I am waiting for the day that the sports program pays off and Rutger’s finances are in order.
Franklin, it’s good to see that the master of avuncular-sounding bafflement is back. But let the Scarlet Knights football team enjoy a day or two of their victory celebrations, okay? God knows they earned it.
And now they’ll be expected to do it again next autumn, after all.
I’m sorry I missed it, but I don’t get the necessary cable channels.
It would have been great if there had been a few local places advertising the fact that you could watch the game there.
I still think it’s more important for RU to get their $$ situation cleared up before touting the wonderful football team. The place is a mess. Trust me–I know from the inside.
Cablevision and the NFL network got over themselves, and Cablevision aired the game.
Hope most subscribers knew that. I just happened over it.
“Boola Boola, Boola Boola, Boola Boola, Boola Boo!”
Now, what comes after that?
sex drugs & rocknroll
Wendnesday I googled Comcast and Rutgers and found out that Comcast was offering a free 30 day trial on digital cable to allow everyone to see the game. This was also in last Friday’s Star Ledger. I went to the Comcasat office just before it closed, set it up and watched the game. Should have posted something about it here, I guess. Sorry.
As a Rutgers graduate I have a few comments. It’s obvious that Rutgers is suffering as a result of the budget cuts but the football team shouldn’t be getting flack for it. Football is the number one money-maker for Rutgers and to cut their budget would mean even less money for the school. The sponsorship and publicity that our team has received this season means more than most people think. This will potentially attract more out of state students to apply to Rutgers which will, in turn, increase the profitability of the University. We are very proud of our team and the budget cuts were simply part of a poor decision made by Governor Corzine and there is no reason the football team should dragged through the mud as a result. Corzine on the other hand…..
As a Rutgers graduate I have a few comments. It’s obvious that Rutgers is suffering as a result of the budget cuts but the football team shouldn’t be getting flack for it. Football is the number one money-maker for Rutgers and to cut their budget would mean even less money for the school. The sponsorship and publicity that our team has received this season means more than most people think. This will potentially attract more out of state students to apply to Rutgers which will, in turn, increase the profitability of the University. We are very proud of our team and the budget cuts were simply part of a poor decision made by Governor Corzine and there is no reason the football team should dragged through the mud as a result. Corzine on the other hand…..
to add to Martha’s comments… at schools like Penn State, the football program throws off so much cash that it literally pays for every other athletic program at the university. Every other sport loses money and is sponsored by football… So, while folks tend to balk at the costs of building a program, the rewards are fairly well established.
Martta, are you a Rutgers or Douglass graduate??
Martha is right in that schools with good teams make money overall, but I don’t think that RU has done a good job of publicizing THAT fact. I’m internal, and didn’t know it until someone showed me an article from the Phila. Inquirer that said that a bowl bid is worth, at a minimum, $1.5 million! Seems like that’s an important piece of information to share from a p.r. point of view. BUT…a) you can’t put the budget blame on Corzine 100% and b)when what we do hear about are CLASSES being cut (as well as other sports teams), it’s still a tough pill to swallow.
All that said, I think it’s great that we won the game, and I’m thrilled for the school and for the players. Now if they could just get a new team to head up the fundraising, there might be some hope for State U!
HOO RAH!
Nic job, Rutgers…you made the Garden State proud.
It looks like Teal finaly turned the corner.
Next year should be great.
If football is bringing in all of this money, then why can’t the Olympic sports like fencing and rowing be saved?
Up stream Red Team.
At most colleges and universities, no sports (save football and basketball some places) make no money whatsoever for the simple reason they don’t commonly charge admission to events. So if a winning football team at a big progran can cover such expenses, it’s wonderful.
What is dismaying about the Rutgers situation is that there are no plans to use even a bit of next season’s projected football revenues to reinstate sports like crew, swimming and fencing. Merely to upgrade and expand football facilities, pay Coach Schiano more, etc. This, unlike the situation at Penn State, sends a terrible message to student athletes, that their efforts are not appreciated, their sports pale before the currying of favor to football “boosters” now seen at Rutgers.
And while there has been much talk of how Schiano is a great guy for staying at Rutgers (albeit with a very reworked deal now), he really could have spoken more forcefully about the shame of RU dropping several varsity sports. Instead, he just said the equivalent of “Gee, that’s tough,” though just the value of that piece of land Rutgers handed over to him so he could build a new house would probably have allowed the dropped sports to continue.
In contrast, the Ivies (where revenues from athletics are almost never of even mild consequence) continue to add sports: men’s hockey at Columbia, women’s lacrosse at Cornell, etc.
It takes nothing from RU’s terrific football success to suggest that, as it comes accompanied by the demise of several other sports, no credit accrues to the university and its administrators for their sudden turn of disinterest towards those sports. And Joe Paterno (an Ivy grad, come to think of it) still seems a much more class guy than Greg Schiano because he actively supports other sports at PSU. But this is New Jersey, after all, and to expect much class from either our state educators or politicians is probably always asking too much.
I have to say, that was one of the more eloquent (though horribly flawed) arguments re: RU sports I’ve seen in a while.
First, it seems rather absurd to cite the attention paid to non-revenue sports at the private and richly endowed ivys. At last check, it costs just under $40,000 a year to attend Harvard. One might expect to be afforded ample opportunity to row up and down the Charles River on a crew team if one is paying approximately the average american’s annual wages to attend.
By contrast, it costs less than half of that sum to attend Rutgers. If each of Rutgers’ 30,000 undergraduates ponied up an additional $20k to pull us even with an ivy, the university would rake in a mere $600 million dollars more. However, having attended Rutgers and having watched as students literally stormed the Office of the Dean over 5% tuition hikes, it seems unlikely a 100% tuition hike is in the offing.
Further, to cite Joe Pa’s love of all sports seems rather odd. Joe Pa is nearing the end of a multi-decade tenure in which he has been granted nearly his every wish at PSU. They have consistently upgraded the stadium (to almost triple the size of Rutgers)… they even built a special cafeteria for athletes where the football players in particular dine on food that is unavailable to the student body in a facility that if off limits to the tuition-paying students… Does that seem fair?
Finally, the land granted to Schiano was undeveloped and valued at about $100k. Even after receiving that, he literally makes $1 million a year less at Rutgers than he would have made at the job he turned down at Miami.
Would you turn down a $1 million dollar raise? I think not.
I doubt I have ever been more in synch with anything Cathar has written than with his posting above, especially as regards the university’s abandonment of the three Olympic sports (crew, fencing, and swimming).
As an RU alumn and NJ taxpayer, I find it shameful and disgusting that the RU Board of Governors, President McCormick, and Bob Mulcahy continue to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to all the appeals that have been made by the university community to reinstate what meager funding had been provided to these sports.
A member of the RU Board of Governors made a most outrageous comment when he said something to the effect that the university should not spend money on sports in which it had no hope of becoming #1.
By that measure, the RU football team should have been eliminated many, many years ago. Back when they, you know, sucked.
As for the comment that “Football is the number one money-maker for Rutgers and to cut their budget would mean even less money for the school”, that is untrue. The university still spends more on the football program than the revenue it generates. In fact, I don’t the football team has ever been self-sustaining, which seems to be what they expect for the sports that are being cut.
Ironically, the biggest long-term financial drain on the Rutgers athletics budget is likely to be women’s basketball. That program loses well in excess of a $1 mil. a year. Coach Vivian Stringer alone, a talented, Hall of Fame coach, drains close to $500k a year from the budget. Yet, I don’t hear anyone here lamenting the cost/benefit of that expenditure.
For some reason, posters like Pork Roll and Martha always focus on football. Yet, the football program is reaching profitability while no other sport ever, ever, ever will. What part of that is lost on y’all?
As a data point, had Rutgers eked out the West Virginia game (which they lost in triple overtime), they would have earned more than $2 million in add’l revenue just this year! That would cover crew, swimming, badminton, checkers, chess, parchesi, intramural ice dancing and of course, synchronized swimming.
…and finally, how many schools actually have crew teams to begin with? I mean, talk about a “nice to have”. Operating a boat house and a fleet of expensive sculls so 30 of Rutgers 30,000 students can participate? talk about misappropriation.
Many reasons why the Rutgers win is a grand slam, most noted above..But, the main one, the one that counts the most,is that I’M a naitve son – RU ’74 – and I just love it.
What a game…I know from past posts, many of you are RU grads too…kind of brought one back to those days..oh yeah.
I wish they did that when I was playing baseball for RU…I bet we would have had more then 10 baseballs to use per game…maybe if we ever had a winning season ourselfs, that might have happened too.
Happy New Year.
Wayne Robbins
If the land sold (given?) to Schiano was undervalued or undeveloped, so what? Sell it at whatever it can bring and save a sport or two. (Really, what sane coach WANTS to live so close to the facilities? And what will Rutgers do with this land once Schiano departs, as he will, and whether or no he actually builds on it?).
Many public universities, by the way, are well endowed too. Michigan comes right to mind, and Texas, and even the University of South Carolina. Maybe not in the exalted class of Princeton or Harvard, but with endowments of $400-500-600 million. That Rutgers is not so well endowed perhaps tells more about the failure of the University to develop such donating ties with both alumni and others than anything else. And really, why is that? Surely no one wishes to suggest that RU grads are either ungrateful or simply don’t make enough money in their chosen careers to donate on such a scale, do they?
Mike G is also much misinformed if he thinks that Harvard, for example, actually collects $40,000 plus from every attending student. Hardly. The percentage of students receiving financial aid at all the Ivies is quite high, generally over 40%. And this aid actually comes from endowments, or anyway from the interest they earn. That’s the great thing about endowments, that and the way they then allow for scholarships for deserving students, jocks and non-jocks alike.
If Schiano is worth another million (at his current salary, not the new contract supposedly being negotiated as this is written), then he is also welcome to get that kind of money somewhere else. Six varsity sports can be saved with approximately $600,000 after all.
And that Penn State offers its football team such magnificent facilities, AND maintains all other varsity sports without any threats of cuts, is wholly to the school’s credit, no? This is a bad thing and makes Joe Paterno a louse? Are we now supposed to indulge Rutgers football as it engages in a bit of “penis envy” over the comparatively smaller and shabbier state of its own quarters and stadium?
Perhaps worst of all is the assumption that sometimes comes out that, now that Rutgers seems well on the way to a consistently winning program, football players somehow equate to more intrinsic “value” than tennis players and rowers and swimmers. Yet if intercollegiate athletics has life benefits and lessons, then even less popular sports should have their day. As the Ivies, big state schools like Michigan and Washington and even small (with small endowments) liberal arts colleges like Hobart and Amherst and Williams recognize. But Rutgers does not.
You really should be ashamed, mike g., to opine that because Rutgers only has about 80 male and female rowers (not 30, as you claimed), the value of their sport is somehow vastly diminished. There were years, in fact, when Rutgers football was lucky to dress 65 players for home games. The value is in the games and sports themselves, not the numbers. (Or do you then think beer drinking, the true “game” of collegiate majorities everywhere, deserves a giant new stadium, training bars, etc. at Rutgers?
The danger in all of this is that Rutgers may well lose what’s left of its soul as it pursues football success at such a high price. Winning bowl games is nice, yes, but so is offering degrees that are recognized for their value throughout the business and academic world. In that respect, Big Ten schools probably still do much, much better than Rutgers. So which should come first, the jocks or the eggheads? (And what is wrong with jocks even also being eggheads?)
Wow, the longer the posts, the more absurd the assertions. Actually, the last post was so rife with fodder that I don’t even know where to start.
1) The well endowed public schools you mentioned (Michigan, South Carolina and Texas) all spend much, much more heavily on football than Rutgers does (and reap big profits from football’s success). The LEAST successful of the three (USC) pays Steve Spurrier $1.75 million a year IN SALARY ALONE. Rutgers simply doesn’t overspend vs. other schools in our class. Quite the opposite.
2) Ironically, not one of these three “well off” schools offers a varsity rowing program. Michigan offers it as a “club sport”… The other two schools don’t offer it at all from what I can tell. In fact, Rutgers offers as many or more sports than all three schools.
3) Amherst? huh? Amherst actually has a $1.1 billion dollar endowment and costs $45k a year to attend. Damn right I better be able to be one of the three people on campus interested in fencing for that kind of corn. Try pulling that off while maintaining several sprawling state campuses for 40% of the cost.
4) Harvard is so richly endowed that 60 Minutes ran a segment recently detailing how the University could remain solvent without collecting a penny of tuition. There is simply no comparison.
I don’t mean to be harsh but you literally got just about every fact and comparison in your post wrong.
While I certainly do understand your opinions on the utopian value of limitless athletic options, Rutgers is simply no different than virtually every other major university that requires public capital to operate.
Ironically, the best chance fencing and rowing have of ever making it back to varsity status is for the football team to win year in and year out. No different here than at South Carolina, Michigan or most other places.
While I don’t know which of the aforementioned facts are actually correct, I have to say that I couldn’t agree more with Cathar’s comment about the RU endowment and issues surrounding fundraising. Someone upthread also mentioned that this is an issue, and I have to agree. Rutgers has done a terrible job of getting graduates in the mindset of GIVING, and unless the administration recognizes that they have to change the attitude to match those who graduate from the Penn States/ Michigans, et al, there will never be a legitimate endowment for RU.
A handful of huge donors don’t cover all needs, contrary to the p.r. machine! The folks who give $100 or $1000 or more year after year are far more valuable. I’d love to know how many of the RU grads reading this are REGULAR donors to RU. I doubt that there are many, and this goes to the root of the problem, as far as I’m concerned.
Bizarre how on one thread you find a bunch of numbskulls and on another you find reasonable people disagreeing in a thoughtful and civilized manner–and on a thread about sports, no less.
Sorry. Carry on.
If folks tend to focus on the football program when discussing the inequities of sports funding at RU, it probably has something to do with the fact that at $14 million the annual budget for football dwarfs that of all the other sports. In this particular instance, I believe they actually increased the football budget this year while they were cutting the budget for others (not to mention cutting back on classes, laying off academic staff, raising tuition, etc.).
And that increase does not reflect the extra honey they are going to put into Greg Schiano’s pot after this season, to add to the $1m or so I believe he already receives in salary and other compensation, including $11k/year for the lease on his Caddy Escalade. All courtesy of us, the NJ taxpayers.
Mike G. seems to infer an anti-football bias as the motivation behind criticism of the football program. I can only speak for myself when I say that I am quite indifferent towards the football program per se. Rather, I harbor great resentment at the misuse of taxpayer dollars in the single-minded support of modern-day gladiatorial glory at a state-funded institution of higher learning where the primary mission should be serving the academic needs of as broad a population of students as possible.
Indeed, if there is any bias to be found, it is the prejudice exhibited by the RU administration, Bob Mulcahy, and some football supporters, such as Mike G., against sports with very long collegiate traditions that they simply dismiss as silly anachronisms.
As for the assertion that RU football is “reaching profitability”, they are not “profitable” yet. They have never even so much as broken even, ever. You might want to let that egg hatch first before you bank on a never-ending winning streak. How much “profitability” is it going to take to recoup what they have spent on football in just the last 10 years alone?
Besides, this is a public university, not an NFL franchise. To measure the worth of these sports in terms of strict profit and loss is a perverse form of accounting that debases the academic mission of the university. The sports programs should exist to attract a diverse body of students and to round out the college experience, not to be the farm teams for professional sports.
It is confounding that, at a time when leading educators are trying to free institutions of higher learning from the distraction of running semi-professional football franchises, Rutgers is charging full tilt in the opposite direction. How sad for education. Rutgers had the opportunity to throw its lot in with the groups of Northeastern universities that treat sports as an adjunct to the proper development and education of young people. How said it chose the other route.
it scares me that i’m agreeing with pork roll these days…
Whether Michigan terms it a club sport or no (I doubt it, but if you’ve actually checked then I’ll take your word for it), mike g., it rows on a competitive varsity level. Every year its crews are down there in Camden for the IRA’s, competing against (if it is in fact a club sport) genuine crew varsity oarsfolk.
And Steve Spurrier is not paid a salary of $1.75 million; rather, his deal has just been restructured so that he can make that much (more, actually, I think) via certain incentives, media shows, etc. Coach Schiano is equally welcome to have a contract of that nature, in fact I believe Miami might have offered him one if talks had gotten that far. Whether NJ can afford to do the same sort of thing is debatable. Surely there are coaches who can win without such high salaries or upgraded facilities somewhere? For the love of the game, even?
Again, too, you forget the purpose of endowments (though I suggest you exaggerate Amherst’s a bit). You also sound much more than a bit envious. But endowments are built up over time in a variety of ways, with gratified graduates probably being the most popular even these days. This perhaps says something about Rutgers you really shouldn’t be raising as a debate point.
I don’t mean to be harsh either, but you simply didn’t understand either the facts or my argument, which you got so very wrong.
To congratulate an underfunded state university on its footbal success is nice. (Even as it remains underfunded, unlike, say, Williams, in so many academically important ways.) To excuse its financial wastefulness in football, however, on the basis that, boo hoo, other state universities are better funded so therefore we should pour money into football by way of playing catch-up, well, that’s another question entirely. And such catch-up ball in financial terms will likely take more than the 2-3 years Schiano may have left at Rutgers. (Or were you perhaps thinking of then luring someone costly like Steve Spurrier here? But I warn you, any coach on that level will demand a premium price for this being NJ.)
Worse, however, I detect a tone of some solid contempt in both your views of other colleges and universities (and their comparative endowments) and of sports other than football and, maybe, basketball. But the fact is also that a place like Harvard or Yale probably gives more extensive financial aid in a year to needy students than Rutgers, with a larger undergraduate enrollment, does. This should in no way be construed as a black mark against it. And at the same time, these schools manage to also offer fencing, swimming, tennis and crew to those “few” who choose to play on an intercollegiate level. Imagine that! The waste of money that could better be spent on tackling dummies! The nerve of these well-endowed upstarts who actually believe in offering a smorgasbord of sports!
“it scares me that i’m agreeing with pork roll these days…
Posted by: Iceman | December 30, 2006 8:48 AM ”
I should scare you more when you agree with cathar
This is certainly an enjoyable debate…
I think my primary issue is that the thread began with what appeared to be a fact-based argument by Cather and Pork Roll on why building a football program is incongruent with the academic mission of a university. Yet, when you peel back the onion even a layer, you quickly realize that it isn’t fact-based at all. The facts cited are wrong or misapplied. Comparisons to richly funded private colleges are spurious. Comparisons to well-endowed smaller colleges are spurious. Comparisons to public universities like South Carolina and Texas reveal that Rutgers actually spends far less on football, yet offers equivalent varsity opportunities.
So when you strip back the falsehoods and straw-mans, you’re left with the opinions of folks who just don’t believe in big time athletics.
However, before the rest of the readership buys into the misrepresentations of the cost/benefit of a football program, consider these actual facts:
1) Football is a potent weapon in building an endowment – At the schools cited by Cathar, football is actually one of, if not THE primary weapon in securing alumni contributions. Since many of us have little occasion to venture back to campus post-graduation, athletics offers an opportunity to re-engage, energize and motivate alumni to remain involved in the university. This engagement deepens ties to the university and fosters a greater willingness to contribute.
As a poignant example, this past year, a 70-year old graduate (Richard Shindell) returned to the Rutgers campus with his wife to attend a football game. He had not been back to the school in many, many, many years. He was so taken by the experience that he vowed to renew his decades dormant interest in the school. His first act was to contribute a display to the lobby of the stadium. His second act was to endow a $3 million dollar neuroscience chair. This endowment alone covers the entire football program’s operating loss. Passive benefits of an engaged alumni base are not measured or attributed to football, and while they are lost on detractors like Cathar, they are not lost at all on major public universities including UNC, Michigan, Penn State, etc.
2) Football contributes more actual revenue than it is credited with – At schools like Penn State and Michigan, your eligibility for the best season tickets is determined in large part by the size of your donation to the school. So, while these donations do not show up on football’s balance sheet, they certainly are the result of the program. Rutgers instituted a similar program three years ago for both basketball and football. The result is that the face value of ticket sales does not reflect the total financial payment to the university for the purposes of attaining those tickets.
3) The football budget for football has only increased in proportion to revenue – While the assertion is that Rutgers is spending wantonly on football, it is actually following a logical and prudent path to close the massive gap between our program and the likes of Penn State, Ohio State, Texas, Michigan. In fact, the increases in spending on the program has only ratcheted up as the program has pulled in additional revenue. As a result, the program’s “loss” (and I say “loss” since the prior two points make clear that the balance sheet accounting belies a financial contribution that outstrips the expense)is actually declining as a percentage of spend even as total budget increases.
4) Program profitability is indeed an imminent likelihood – three of the contributors to program profitability are ticket sales, bowl revenues and appearance fees. Should be quite clear to all that Rutgers’ improved performance is clearly helping the first two. This year’s attendance will set a school record and continues a four-year trend of improvement.
Regarding appearance fees… In 2002, Rutgers travelled to Tennessee to play the Volunteers. The school received a $750,000 payment for the appearance in a mere regular season game. This single game cut the operating loss in half. In the years since, Rutgers has opted to schedule weaker opponents like Army, Navy, Buffalo, UNH to allow the program to post better win-loss records, earn bowl bids, and secure better recruits and thus improve the ability to play more of the Tennessee’s of the world in the future. Again, the effort has clearly paid off in the first three categories. Improved record, two consecutive bowl bids and a stellar recruiting class seem to bear that out.
In the final category, Rutgers is making strides as well. The schedule in upcoming years replaces schools like Buffalo with schools like Notre Dame.
5) Lastly, Rutgers is poised to reap greater rewards from stadium revenues – when Rutgers improved the stadium, they inked a deal with dining services that allowed the cafeteria to collect all concessions revenue at the stadium until the improvements were self-funded. Ironically, dining services is credited with revenues generated by football attendees. As anyone who follows pro sports knows, stadium concessions are a substantial revenue generator… Add these to the program’s bottom-line and you push even farther into the black.
…and finally, all of the above assumes that the primary and perhaps sole measure of football’s value is in it’s financial contribution. I would posit that this is untrue. It is acceptable to believe that football plays a role in elevating a university’s visibility, in engaging its constituents, in attracting future students and faculty. Its acceptable to think that football galvanizes and unites the 10,000 students who attend the games and that this cohesion is a part of why these students fondly remember their years and contribute as alumni… and round and round it goes.
Now, if you want to debate a university’s fundamental mission, that’s a whole other story!
Mike G.
Mike g., I don’t know where you get this nonsense, but at places like Dartmouth and Yale and Williams football is emphatically NOT the “primary weapon” for reaping alumni financial support. It isn’t even much of a weapon, and I can indeed cite chapter and verse. (But crew, mike is traditionally the sport which reaps the highest per capita alumni contributions to Ivy schools.) At any rate, the size of any college’s endowment is not directly commensurate with gridiron success, as I’m positive Ivy folk would tell you (let alone a place like Swarthmore or NYU, both of which lack football teams altogether). Mike g (whom I sense is a staunch Rutgers fan and grad) is much mistaken there.
But if one Richard Shindell was so moved by Rutgers football this year tht he gave $3 million, perhaps Rutgers administrators might profitably go back and ask him for the mere $600,000 it would take to retain those dropped sports. Or at least earmark the next donations that amount to that much to that end. In lieu of, at the least, another lobby display.
As for eligibility for season tickets being determined by one’s donation level, so what? This is a well known practice everywhere (although someplace like Columbia. where there are plenty of tix to go around, this instead determines your parking place at Baker field). That Rutgers follows suit is no great surprise. To term it “prudent” to attempt to catch up to places like Michigan and Texas in terms of athletic success and facilities, however, is an appalling misuse of language. If only because neither institution has recently dropped either intercollegiate sports or course offerings, unlike Rutgers.
And while Mike rightly touts the emotional and affective values of football, he is, again, carefully blotting out the admission that this same building of tie alumni ties with today’s student-athletes could also be accomplished via tennis, swimming, crew, etc. This is a curious omission, though it plays well with the macho hurly-burly of a successful football program.
Dear cathar
go paint your head blue and white, this is a very boring discussion
Cathar,
Please, please, please… I’m begging you to stop comparing a publicly funded institution’s offerings to the most richly endowed private schools in the country. Dartmouth costs more than double what Rutgers costs. They offer more because their students pay for more. Please tell me you understand the fundamentals of economics. Please, please, please stop with these unbelievably spurious comparisons.
Further, you fail to actually address any of the points made. Confronted with evidence that football contributes more financially than it drains, you move on to complaining that a benefactor who chaired neurosciences should have instead backed the crew team. Spare us all…
Highly doubtful a reasonable reader would think a person was wrong for donating $3 million to benefit the school’s science program instead of a pastime for literally .01% of the student population.
Further, you consistently cite these cuts in programs. If these cuts are draconian, how come they only bring us roughly into line with the schools you yourself offered as examples?
We get it. You don’t like football. It doesn’t matter if most students do. It doesn’t matter if it provides more than it takes. It doesn’t matter if it spurs applications, increases donations and pays for advances and upgrades elsewhere. What does matter is that you personally believe the school’s governors have an overriding obligation to serve 80 students interested in crew and even fewer interested in fencing out of 30,000 undergrads even though most other similar schools do not. Similar is the key word here. $45,000 a year Amherst is not similar.
Needless to say, you certainly have a right to champion for the most minute of minorities. Personally, I’d take a strong neurosciences program built on the back of a football booster over a robust fencing team anyday.
Mike G., you must be new here…meet Cathar, the most annoying person you’ll ever have a “discussion” with.
As mentioned before, google him and you’ll see he is equal opportunity. He spends time annoying people on many other sites as well as this.
All these “Hiding in B’villes”.
Is it too hard to invent a nom de plume!? Get creative! Turn Rutgers sports programs into intramurals. Forget about competing with the Ivies. This is NJ home of the poison Ivies!…(;o})8=====
Thanks, Hiding… as the thread wore on, it became rather clear that Cathar throws out an ill-researched allegation and then jumps off it when challenged or corrected.
Regardless, I do hope Rutgers finds a way to preserve crew, tennis, etc. I tend to doubt they’ll get a gallows reprieve but you never know.
On that note, I’m off this thread. So, Cathar and Pork, thanks for the spar. Good debate that pushed me to learn more about what I speak. All good.
The floor is yours for the last word!
Happy New Year.
Word.
Pork Roll and Mike G view big time college football as a very desireable activity because it brings money, notoriety,students who wish to be affiliated with notoriety, etc etc.
Educators maintain that overemphasized sports detract from and impair the academic function of the university. I agree with Cathar that the educators have it right.
Pork Roll and Mike G view big time college football as a very desireable activity because it brings money, notoriety,students who wish to be affiliated with notoriety, etc etc.
Educators maintain that overemphasized sports detract from and impair the academic function of the university. I agree with Cathar that the educators have it right.
Hiding,
You should probably re-read my posts, because that was not my position at all.
Walleroo feels that this thread is lacking in numbskull commenary, so I’ll provide some, and say what i always say when football is the topic: Football is for dopes.
ditto
As both a Rutgers grad. & a former member of the Rutgers Crew team, I am glad that the football team is winning! It will help the school do well! I can remember when Rutgers used to play Penn St. – I had a girlfriend at Penn St. and I would go up to State College to see the games. Talk about painful – it was very rough to be a college student who’s football team was the laughing stock of football.
As far as crew & the other lost sports – yes, it saddens me deeply, but I can understand the economics. However, even the other private schools (ie. Columbia, Cornell, & the other ECRC Ivy League schools that Rutgers would race against)have the same budget issues. The difference was in Alumni donations. I can remember going up to Ithaca,NY (to race against Cornell) and I was simply in awe of their boathouse. It was 5x the size of the Rutgers boathouse & was as well equipped as an olympic training facility. However, I was soon told that most of the money to support the program came from alumni donations.
Why do I bring this up? Well, a strong football tradition does bring in money for a school in alumni donations. Think of Notre Name, etc. For a majority of Rutgers students, they used to be very apathetic about “Rutgers pride”. It used to anger me that I was in college with students who would laugh at their own sports teams. If we can make more students proud of their alma matta, then their donations will also hopefully rise.
PS – Corzine still sucks.
Moved to Verona…..(and “Notre Name” is very good even if it probably wasn’t intentional, but “alma matta” and “who’s” were just embarassing, or were you just joshing all the way through your post by way of reflection upon the quality of your undergrad education?), the idea is usually to give because one had such a swell or intellectually stimulating time in college, not just because the football team wins a lot. Are you seriously suggesting that you’re willing to wait for some sort of filter-down effect to other sports from Rutgers’ football success? And how long will that take? And what happens if Schiano has a bad year next or the year after? Or two or even three bad years in a row again? And if you think supporting crew and those other dropped sports is expensive (though it costs less than it did to send Rutgers to the Texas Bowl, buy new uniforms for it, etc.), imagine how costly it’d be to REVIVE such sports on an intercollegiate level after an absence of some years.
You sound like sort of a fair weather friend of your own alma mater. So I hope you’ve at least donated in the past yourself to Rutgers crew. It really is a fine program, and over the last 20 years has had more aggregate success than Rutgers football.
Perhaps the real difference between Rutgers and the East Coast schools it rows against is that they retain an ingrained sense that the maintenance of athletic programs is key to the maturation of its student body as a whole. The whole “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton..” thing (even if Wellington supposedly said no such thing). So Rutgers may indeed be more “realistic” via its current infatuation with football, even as it drops both course offerings and other sports. But it is still not on the side of the angels here. Nor is it setting an admirable precedent of any kind. That New Jersey is so desperate to convey a “winning” demeanor that it will countenance the current goings-on at Rutgers is deplorable.
In any case, since pride traditionally goes before a fall, I would recommend that Rutgers grads from classes other than your own learn how to spell “alma matta” correctly before they graduate, whatever sport they follow or play before they graduate. This will help them in the real employment world more than a bowl game win, I’m guessing.
And, mike g. I still don’t think you know what you’re talking about, or encouraging, with regard to the true cost of Rutgers’ current football success. (Or how comparative programs at non-public colleges and universities work, let alone why )But you’ll find out, won’t you? This one does seem a juggernaut. In the interim, try at least to conceal your obvious tendency towards being a “class warrior” when it comes to other, private and state akike, schools that neither cut sports nor course offerings. Football is not the world. But it will cost what seems like it to hire a new coach who can mimic (or even exceed) his success after Schiano loves for someplace else, as leave he eventually will.
On the other hand, anyone who thinks I don’t like football or that it’s for “dopes” (smirkysleep and PAZ, for example), the answers are: not at all and no, it is not, it is decidedly not. Obviously, the matter is just too complex for all you groundlings to think through in any real complexity.
“alma matta”
Hey, whatsa matta you?