RUTGERS IS ONE BIG TRAIN WRECK

The administration at Rutgers is starting to make the one at Penn State look competent.
After the Mike Rice fiasco, subsequent cover-up, and dismissal of AD Tim Pernetti, there was
hope the slate would be clean to rebuild it's program. It's now dirtier than ever.

The school hired Julie Hermann on May 15 to be it's new athletic director, and apparently Rutgers
didn't bother to perform its due diligence on Hermann.. According to the Star-Ledger, Hermann,
who had been the volleyball coach at Tennessee 16 years ago, was forced to quit after her players
submitted a letter that said Hermann motivated through humiliation, fear, and emotional abuse.

According to the Star-Ledger, the players said Hermann called them "whores, alcoholics and
learning disabled" and they wrote: "It has been unanimously decided that this is an irreconcilable issue."

Um, hello, Rutger? Isn't this exactly what Mike Rice was fired for? OK, there wasn't videotape
of Hermann abusing her players like Rice,but how the heck could you have missed this one? Hermann might just be Rice with a longer hair and a skirt on.  Intimidating, volatile, abusive? Rutgers just hired someone to run it's athletic  program after firing someone who basically got
them into this giant mess, costing them embarrassment, humiliation, and a significant amount
of money.

I'm wondering what kind of brilliant response Rutgers president Robert Barchi is going to have
for this one. After the Rice scandal broke, he admitted  he didn't bother to look at the
videotapes of Rice throwing basketballs at players that had shocked pretty much everyone in
the world, except the administration at Rutgers. I'm wondering if he's going to take responsibility
or just pass the buck as he did in the Rice scandal.

Perhaps, Rutgers knew about Hermann's less than squeaky clean past, but figured that no one
would find out about it. After all, to them, Tennessee volleyball and Knoxville, must have
seemed to be on another planet where the media won't dig that hard to find dirt. They forgot to
realize the media always digs hard to find the real dirt. And this is real dirt.

Rutgers hired a person to run it's entire athletic program, not just the basketball one, whose
history is not a good one. She's the female version of Mike Rice. How else can you explain it?
It will be interesting to see how Rutgers handles this one. Oh, right, "we knew about it, but
everyone deserves a second chance", is probably going to be their explanation. Well, they did
give Rice a second chance until those videotapes emerged and they buckled under the pressure
and canned him.

This incident comes on the heels of the hiring of new basketball coach Eddie Jordan, who went
to Rutgers, but never graduated, despite a press release put out by the university saying that he
had. Embarrassing. The university was forced to admit that Jordan never graduated from Rutgers.

Now, they have a new athletic background with a history of player abuse. Wonderful. Do you
know who's looking better and better in all of this? Former AD Tim Pernetti, who took the fall
for the incompetence of the administration.




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