sporting life

what would he have to do to get a four-game suspension?

the basketball coach at rutgers university was fired this week.

seems he wasn't very good at coaching basketball.

there was his win-loss record, of course: 44-51 in three years. but that's not why coach mike rice was fired.

he was fired because a video of him "coaching" in practice went viral, and suddenly a lot of people decided they didn't like mike rice very much.

the video shows him shoving and hitting and kicking his players. it shows him hurling basketballs at them from point-blank range.

and it records him calling players "faggot" and "cunt."

administrators at rutgers, including the university president, were aware of rice's behavior for months. after reviewing tape of the practices in december 2012, athletic director tim pernetti suspended rice for three games and fined him $75,000.

but it wasn't until the video hit the internet that pernetti decided, "oops, now i have to fire this guy."

rice was making $700,000 a year to coach a division-1 ncaa basketball program. you might think a person who has risen to that kind of position would be smart enough to know it's not okay to commit serial assault on your players. or to call them "faggot." any more than you'd call a black person "nigger" or a woman a "cunt."

not okay. under any circumstances. and not just because it doesn't get the results you want. but because the players you're responsible for might get the idea that such misconduct is acceptable. and go on to do the same thing themselves. because that's what you taught them.

too far-fetched? here's what a couple of his players said:

Mike Coburn, whose last season at Rutgers was Rice's first in 2010-11, said he had no issues with the coach's treatment of players, and because he was a team captain, he took the brunt of it. He said Rice was challenging them to excel and, though he acknowledged how Rice's coaching style may look to outsiders, he said players understood it.

"No, I'm not personally offended by it," Tyree Graham said in a telephone interview. "I backed what Coach Rice did for the most part. But I can't say it got results," he said. "It didn't work. If those tactics don't work, it should stop."

shorter graham: a better record would've justified his coach's actions. and the fact is, a few more wins and there's no telling how long they might have gone on. just like at, say, the penn state football program.

mike rice is gone as head coach at rutgers. not because he did something abhorrent.

but because he didn't win enough basketball games.

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update: as of this morning, one of the rutgers assistant coaches, jimmy martelli, has resigned. martelli can be seen on the video exhibiting the exact same behaviors as his former boss. 

athletic director tim pernetti has been cut loose as well.