I am floored by the number of "Rutgers people" who have the potential to be large donors who say things indicating that they " were big Tim Pernetti fans," "really don't like Julie Hermann" and thought "the school will never do well until she is gone." Two senior partner type attorneys I am working with told me that last week when we were talking Rutgers after a meeting. I said something along the lines of "I liked Tim a lot too, because he was a great person to work with, but I have to say he was pretty much a disaster as an AD. I think in the long run Julie will be much better." They literally looked at me like I was crazy, and asked why. I said well if you look at it, Tim was a nice guy, but he hired two of the biggest disasters in school history. All of the crap we are dealing with now was because of Tim's management. I pointed out the ridiculousness of hiring an assistant to save a single recruiting class, and the disastrous hiring and firing of Mike Rice. It was fun watching that sink in for people who had never really consisdered it. People liked Tim so much as a person, that they completely overlooked his actual job performance. I doubled down by pointing out that Julie was the first "true college athletics professional we had ever had running our department."
They said, well she is no good with the media. And at that point I knew this was a case of more people basing their opinion on the Star ledger. I said, I don't care one little bit. I said if she hires good coaches and raises money, she has my support. I couldn't care less what the media says. I used the line from here, "do you know who the Athletic Director of Alabama or OSU are? Of course they didn't. Its not about the media, its about the result on the field.
It was a fun conversation, and I think afterwards, they had a totally different viewpoint. It also was yet another example of how much damage has been done to the average fan by the SL. Intelligent people who dont know of the biases and poltical underpinnings really do take their reporting as the "state of the union"
