From any angle, numbers don't add up in Mulcahy firing
by Jerry Izenberg/The Star-Ledger
Sunday December 14, 2008, 8:26 PM
Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger

There was a time when Bob Mulcahy and Richard McCormick presented a united front for Rutgers.
For six years, Bob Mulcahy was more trouble to Giants center Shaun O'Hara than a middle linebacker with blood in his eyes. He would see O'Hara on the sideline at Rutgers football games, or just outside the locker room, and always the conversation would end with a single question:
"When are you coming back?"

Not for a donation or a pep talk to the troops. Rutgers University still owed him three credits and O'Hara owed Rutgers the classroom time to collect them. Mulcahy never let up.
Eventually, O'Hara came home and earned his belated BA degree.

"We are a university," Mulcahy said last week by way of explanation. "That's what we are supposed to do. That's why their parents put their trust in us."
The operative phrase here was "supposed to do." There are a lot of universities where this couldn't have happened ... places where the athletic director gives that responsibility a low priority. But not at Rutgers under Mulcahy.

But last week, the athletic director got fired.

The primary way the NCAA measures a university's ability to educate its athletes is called the Academic Progress Report, which deals with graduation rates. In apportioning the results of the APR, the athletic director is -- or should be -- the main responsible source. That report puts Rutgers third in the country behind Navy and Stanford and among six teams that made the top call. That made it first among state universities.

But last week the athletic director got fired.

The tail-that-wagged-the-doggie logic was filled with politics and was self-serving, with even a little cowardice from the president and the Board of Governors.

So the athletic director got fired.

The recent investigative report on the athletic department authorized by the Board of Governors was a compendium of correct, partial and contradictory facts. The report said spending was out of control, and you could make that case. But what the report did not say, but was true, was that the school's president, Richard McCormick, constantly agreed with what Mulcahy was trying to achieve, and never set guidelines for Mulcahy to follow.

One must assume that the president, if he gave any of this any thought (until prompted by people with scores to settle and ad hoc agendas) must have been waiting for guidelines to appear through prayer and osmosis. The president couldn't grasp the fact that, as Pogo would say:

"I has met the enemy and he is me."

So the athletic director got fired.

On Wednesday, McCormick sent for Mulcahy. When the AD got there, the president made sure he had a witness. Then, according to Mulcahy, he said, "I want your resignation by the 31st of the month."

The president, according to Mulcahy, was nervous. The conversation, he said, went like this:

"Why?"

"I want to go a different way."

"What does that mean? What did I do?"

"You haven't been sensitive to the audit report."

"But you and I discussed it and agreed to work out the solution."

The president said nothing.

"I'm not resigning. Fire me if you want."

Then Mulcahy walked out. The president called him twice later in the day. Mulcahy did not pick up the phone.

"He announced it before I could tell my own family," Mulcahy said. "I have seven kids and a wife. I have 44 years of public service, and he sends me out like this."

That night, Mulcahy sent an e-mail to everyone who works in the Hale Center or the Rutgers Athletic Center and all the athletes, coaches and trainers, calling a meeting for 9 a.m. the next day.

That next morning they were there in the bleachers at the RAC -- nearly 800 of them ... coaches and secretaries; custodians and parking attendants; football players who had come from practice in jerseys and shoulder pads ... other athletes.

When Mulcahy walked in, they stood as one and cheered. And then the room was dead silent. Mulcahy spoke in soft but emotional tones. He spoke of what all of them together had achieved. He spoke of them as family ... of Rutgers as the glue that held them together ... a unit with a mission that he said he was sure they would not falter in when he was gone.
"I love you," he told them.

When he finished, the first one out of the stands was Kenny Britt, the All-Big East wide receiver. They hugged and they whispered to each other, and when they broke that embrace, a line longer than you can imagine and stronger than the president or much of the Board of Governors could understand waited by turns to express their thanks for what they knew their athletic director had achieved.

That night, Mulcahy went back to the RAC to watch the women's basketball team. When he entered the building, half the crowd -- roughly 2,000 people -- offered a standing ovation. At about that time two spectators swear they saw the president leave the building.

On Friday the Rutgers Board of Governors held a meeting on campus. When the president took the podium, he said, "We are here to honor what Bob Mulcahy did for this university," and someone in the crowd hollered,

"Why didn't you?"

"We should give him respect," McCormick said.

And someone else shouted "Why didn't you?" When the president said we are looking for new leadership for the athletic department, someone boomed back "and for the university."

Whatever mistakes Mulcahy made, he is the one who cleaned up an academic mess when he got to Rutgers and who never let the worst in college athletics surface on his campus. It wasn't the president who was proactive for his students when the Rutgers women's basketball team was verbally assaulted beyond belief.

It was Mulcahy.

He stood with coach C. Vivian Stringer's young ladies after Don Imus' disgusting radio rhetoric (he called the team "nappy-headed hos") and the whining apology Imus offered in total panic. Mulcahy was their counselor and their protector and their guardian. And he trusted them enough to let them speak for themselves. Ask them and they will tell you. So will their coach.

He is the one who stepped up and helped hold the Big East together at a time when Rutgers was perilously close to being without any league.

He hired Greg Schiano, who has brought football at Rutgers dignity and honor, and stuck with him through some of the darkest 100-yard days the school that invented football ever experienced.

On Friday, David Harris, a member of the Board of Governors, said, "In my six years on the board, I never knew Bob Mulcahy to take an independent action, that is, an action without approval of Dick McCormick."

It wasn't the athletic director who failed in his obligation. It was a president who is a far more naked emperor than charismatic leader. The emperor has no footprints that even begin to lead toward a legacy. The emperor has no clothes.

So the athletic director got fired.
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COMMENTS (36)Post a comment
Posted by ScarletRogue on 12/14/08 at 8:43PM
Thanks Jerry..We need you back. There was no secret here. From The Ledger 2006:
By MATTHEW FUTTERMANSTAR-LEDGER STAFF
Here come the boosters.
The minute state Senate President Richard Codey got off the phone with Rutgers' head football coach last Friday, he knew what was going to happen.
Greg Schiano was going to stay at Rutgers instead of jumping to the University of Miami. and Rutgers was going to give him more money.
State and university officials were going to have to start hitting up private sources to cover the raise.
"I don't know numbers, but I'm thrilled he's staying," Codey said yesterday after Schiano announced he would remain. "The university has to make the decision for what is best and how much success they can accomplish. They came within an inch of the Orange Bowl and maybe another $10 million when you consider the intangibles. Are those intangibles worth it? I think they are."
Perhaps, but as Rutgers continues its struggle through a budget crisis that includes cutting six varsity sports after this year, the university will have to enter new territory by seeking private funding to give Schiano his due as one of the country's top young football coaches. Rutgers has used public money to pay Schiano $250,000 and $625,000 from "Nelligan Corporate Sponsorship moneys" according to his contract. That provision refers to Nelligan Sports Marketing, the Little Falls company that sells advertising for the university's athletic program.
The guaranteed money rises to $675,000 from 2007 through 2010 and to $750,000 in 2011 and 2012. Now Rutgers will follow the formula of several other major public universities, which often turn to local alumni and businesses to pay a substantial chunk of their football coach's salary.
Seton Hall did it in the 1980s when it wanted to keep basketball coach P.J. Carlesimo and asked its well-known supporters, including Robert Brennan, Frank Walsh and Dennis Kozlowski, to donate money for the specific purpose of giving the coach more. In exchange, boosters get prime seats and entertainment at games, and access to the coaches, who come speak to their companies or local teams for free.
It's a step that has burned football programs in the past, when boosters have gotten too close to the team and handed no-show jobs to players, but college sports experts say if the proper controls are put in place, everyone can win.