The High-Stakes Gamble: When College Athletes Balance Championship Dreams and Life-Saving Research

Robert Barchi, as president of Rutgers, once said, “We made it clear that we were not in position to expand our stadium at the current time,” Barchi said, “and that if entry into the Big Ten was predicated on a major investment on facilities now, then we would have to pass.” He would have passed on joining the Big Ten if it required RU to build anything!!

To be fair, he also said in that interview, “There’s a huge potential value to athletics if it’s done correctly,” Barchi said. “On the other hand, it can also be a big risk to an institution from a financial point of view. And the cost of doing big-time athletics, if it’s not appropriately addressed and managed, can be a major drain on the resources that might be used to support academic programs. It’s a path that one might want to go down, but a path you want to be careful in managing and plotting your future.” Fair points. And, let’s also note that Julie Hermann was the AD under Barchi.

Barchi (and I was not a big fan of his) understood the financial pitfalls of getting in over your head with athletics. He was, though, brought on not for athletics but to integrate the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey into Rutgers University. That was in 2013; the next year RU was in the Big Ten….ready or not.

And the truth is, Rutgers was not. Forget facilities. The University endowment trailed other B1G schools, donations were lacking, ticket sales, licensing agreements and merchandise sales paled in comparison to the established schools we were now competing against. So, the logical move (need?) should have been to spend more to try to catch up, whether we had it or not.

But we didn’t. Go back to the 1980s when University President Edward Bloustein said Rutgers was going “bigger time”, not big time. The thought was RU could change the schedule but not the way it did things. 1976 was Rutgers’ second undefeated season. That year, under Frank Burns, the Knights played Navy, Bucknell, Princeton, Cornell, Connecticut, Lehigh, Columbia, Massachusetts, Louisville, Tulane, and Colgate. 11-0

Ten years later – 1986 – the schedule had been “upgraded”, there was a different coach in Dick Anderson, and RU went 5-5-1 against that “upgraded” slate: Boston College, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Syracuse, No. 5 Penn State, Florida, Army, Louisville, West Virginia, Pitt, Temple.

Ten years, a “bigger time” schedule, a coach hired from Penn State. But, no increased budgets, no added academic support, no additional scholarships. Oh, Rutgers did add the bubble for indoor practice; it’s still Rutgers indoor practice facility. Rutgers went from undefeated to .500.

Want to know how long we’ve been talking about this, about the need to do something about finances and facilities? I wrote about it 12 years ago right here on OTB.

At the ten year anniversary of its arrival on the Big Ten stage, the articles in nj.com were pretty straight forward on the move: “It [Rutgers] could end up in a conference with powerhouses like Michigan and Ohio State, playing for the highest of stakes on a national stage. Or, it could find itself without a stable home like Connecticut, existing on shoestring budgets while trying to recruit high school athletes under a cloud of uncertainty.” And the bigger problem was, there was no real way to pay for the bigger budgets that Rutgers needed and then created.

Back to Brian Rosenberg’s thoughts on higher ed. The traditional research university – the schools of the Big Ten, the SEC, the ACC, the Big XII – are built on a European model that emphasizes research, teaching, and public service. The American Association of Universities is built around that idea; at one point, the Big Ten required membership in the AAU to be in the conference; it’s one of the core reasons Rutgers got the invitation. But is it practical to do all three – I think so – and can everyone afford it?

And still make it to a bowl game.

We’ll explore more in the next installment of Can They Afford It? The Crushing Weight of Funding Modern College Athletics with Part 3: Who “earns” more, the coach or the professor?