In the three years since Rutgers announced that it would join the Big Ten, its sports teams have made headlines repeatedly, but mostly for the wrong reasons.
There was the player-abuse scandal that cost the men’s basketball coach and the athletic director their jobs, and the embarrassing revelation that the coach’s replacement, a beloved former player, had not in fact graduated from the university, as he and Rutgers had claimed. This fall, there was the dismissal of six football players before the team’s second game for their suspected involvement in criminal incidents and their coach’s three-game suspension for contacting a teacher and asking her to give a player extra-credit homework to keep him eligible.