On Nov. 20 of last year, Rutgers was on top of the college athletics world.
On that date, decades of building a once-moribund athletic program finally paid off—the school was accepted as a member of the Big Ten, a major step up from the disintegrating Big East and a proud moment for the state university of New Jersey.
How things have changed.
Since then, men’s basketball coach Mike Rice has been fired for hurling balls and curses at players during practice, athletic director Tim Pernetti and an assistant coach have resigned, and a full-scale investigation into all sports at the New Brunswick school has been put into motion.
And now there are questions surrounding the history of both the new hoops coach and new athletic director.
It turns out Rice’s replacement, Eddie Jordan, was not a graduate of Rutgers—just a former student-athlete for the Scarlet Knights. And Pernetti’s replacement, Julie Hermann, was embroiled in bad relationships with some of her players and an assistant at Tennessee, while she was the women’s volleyball coach in the 1990s.
A look back at Rutgers’ controversial journey:
