You have a lot of good things to say and I believe you are intelligent. I think you would also agree the media and especially certain newspapers have a very important role to play when it comes to politics.
I am going to guess there are things in this article that should be known. I think Rutgers owes it to the taxpayers of NJ to be transparent.
I don’t think this is a pointless attack. It may be an attack.
It’s pointless to talk about cutting sports.
The goal is to get our revenue sports to produce enough wins to create a self sustaining cycle of revenue and donations that it covers the entire athletics program including non-revenue sports. That doesn’t happen without first investing in the revenue sports at an appropriate level.
RU has never historically done that. Now it is. We got hit by a pandemic right when the school began to invest properly in it’s revenue sports. Which creates a temporary loss of revenue right as we’ve just invested heavily.
Borrowing money internally and against our BIg Ten share is part of all this. And perfectly okay.
A strong athletics department is good for the school. It provides lots of benefits in terms of branding and visibility that just won’t happen without it. Think of it like a marketing expense.
Two of my kids, very good students with lots of options to go almost anywhere they wanted chose to go through the RU honors program for their undergrad degrees. Neither one would’ve even
considered doing so if not for their exposure to the school via the football program during Schiano‘s first stint here.
It’s not that they are big on college football, they aren’t. It’s that they associated good times and family togetherness with RUFB games which lodged RU in their heads as a potential destination. Without that exposure, that positive marketing of the brand through the football program, there was zero chance they would’ve opted to go to RU. One is now a lawyer. The other is in a PhD program for Physical therapy and will likely own her own practice at some point. They both had very positive experiences with the school and are likely to be good donors o the school.
That sort of thing is a great way for RU to continue to build the quality of it’s academic programs, and improve it’s reputation, by bringing in more and more high GPA kids who then go on to grad schools become very successful and subsequently give back to the school.
It sounds like Holloway gets that. Barchi might’ve too, but was hired to manage other priories. To make money, you gotta spend money. RU athletics spending was never good enough to lead to sustainable success. Now we’re finally spending intelligently.
