Lights out for Knights?

Rutgers football facing a struggle -- on and off the field

Think about this. Greg Schiano, if he’d played his cards right, might have stepped into the head-coaching job at the University of Miami when Butch Davis left for the pros after the 2000 season. Instead, Schiano jumped weeks earlier for the head job at Rutgers and offensive coordinator Larry Coker -- his rival on the other side of the ball at Miami -- ended up replacing Davis.

The rest, as they say, is history. Coker owns an unblemished record, a national title and a fat new contract in Coral Gables. Meanwhile, poor Schiano appears on the verge of getting buried in the New Jersey swamp, his Scarlet Knights waxed earlier this season by the likes of Buffalo and Villanova -- with hopeless games against Miami, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech and Boston College still to come.

This Saturday, Schiano & Co. trek to Knoxville, where awaits a $750,000 check and a likely spanking from the Tennessee Vols, no doubt ornery coming off a pitiful home showing against Florida.

But that may not be the coach’s worst nightmare. There is a vocal though small faction of Rutgers students, faculty and alumni campaigning to de-emphasize sports on campus, calling for a return to the non-scholarship days and advocating creation of the Liberty League, filled by the likes of William & Mary, New Hampshire, Delaware and James Madison.

The non-jock crowd doesn’t want academic standards dragged down by what they describe as slam-dunkers. Nor money thrown at athletic facilities when classrooms are overcrowded and in disrepair. They’re not keen on the corruption that they see accompanying big-time athletics, either. And they aren’t itching to be a sports factory in the mode of Nebraska or Florida State.

The leader of what’s called the Rutgers 1000 is English professor William Dowling, the group’s faculty advisor and a feisty character who helped register black Southern voters in the ‘60s. The watchdog group has been around for almost a decade, so it isn’t easily dismissed. And it packs some alumni clout, including former advertising executive Richard Seclow (Class of ’51) and Noble Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (Class of ’32).

Faculty or students from Rice, Buffalo and Connecticut have approached the Rutgers 1000 about issues on their campuses, but none have mustered as organized an effort.

Here it is, an interesting, protracted battle. You have Friedman tied to the crowd wanting to cut sports down to size, while The Sopranos' star mobster, James Gandolfini (Class of ‘83), has been pictured on billboards in Miami helping Schiano promote the football program.

Friedman himself penned some words to help the Rutgers 1000 cause, such as: "Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students ... not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes."

But here’s the kicker: Rutgers administration barred critical ads accompanied by Friedman’s words from appearing in the alumni magazine. A judge subsequently ruled against the university last year. Meanwhile, Rutgers is said to have run up legal bills approaching $500,000.

Dowling argues the athletic program also lost $13 million last year, $7 million alone in football -- numbers that university officials dispute.

Even worse, he blames big-time sports for shifting priorities on campus, for swaying the brightest students to go elsewhere and for leading top faculty to move on.

“It takes time to understand how this guts a university," says Dowling, an Ivy League product who taught at New Mexico during the cheating days of hoops coach Norm Ellenberger. "There is now a whole industry in dumbed down college textbooks, which are written down to the eighth-grade level with very simple sentences and words.

"Sports programs tend to shift the center of gravity for academic and intellectual values. You lose all the best students, the best faculty. We have the richest applicant pool in the United States other than California right here in New Jersey. Yet Rutgers loses 70 percent of its top quintile students to out-of-state institutions. Again, the ones that go off to Harvard and Yale, God bless them. But a lot of them are going off to places like Vermont, places that aren’t better than Rutgers."

The Rutgers administration counters that there’s a serious commitment to the Big East Conference. A new 42,000-seat stadium has just opened and another $10 million is budgeted to expand an adjoining complex that houses the weight room, academic support facilities and training room.

Dowling and his followers are portrayed as well-intentioned folks who fail to grasp the big picture. The professor himself has been described as a leftover from the '60s, a description he's likely to relish.

"Look, on a college campus people are free to say whatever they want to say," offers athletic director Robert Mulcahy, former CEO of the New Jersey Sports Authority. "Professor Dowling has been saying this for years, and it has not affected anything here."

OK, Rutgers keeps putting out a bad football product, too. The last winning season was 7-4 in 1992 under Doug Graber, two head coaches ago. Since joining the Big East in 1991, the Knights are 41-81-1 overall and 15-59-1 in conference play. Since Schiano took over last season, they're 0-8 in the Big East, 3-12 in all games.

The word now from university insiders is that it’ll take Schiano four good recruiting classes to produce a winner, so he figures to be halfway there. School officials really want this to work. There’s a booster mentality at work here, if you will, believing it would do wonders for the state image if Rutgers fielded a winner.

A retreat to non-scholarship athletics would smack of nothing short of isolationism and elitism, some believe. Ron Giaconia, chair of the university’s board of governors subcommittee on athletics, proudly notes that 19 of the top 20 college football teams are state universities -- and that only nine states (Alaska, Delaware, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Vermont) don’t field a Division 1-A football program.

"Those states must see something in a successful football program," Giaconia says. "Something to create enthusiasm, make people feel proud. Is Division 1-A a fraud at Stanford, at Cal-Berkeley, at the University of Michigan, at Wisconsin, at Duke?"

Well, Dowling and his friends would say yes, if athletes aren’t held to the same academic standards when it comes to admissions, which is often the case.

"We’re not anti-athletic, just simply opposed to the fantasy that this is a farm team for the NFL," says Seclow, the Rutgers alum. "And you don’t need to have people with 800 SATs that attract people to tailgate picnics. That may work in some places, I don’t know.

"College football at this Division 1-A level is a business. It is a TV-sensitive business. The group I represent isn’t concerned about bowl games. We’re interested in people getting a decent education."

Clearly, the selection of the next Rutgers president figures to determine the direction of the athletic program. That decision may come within a month or so.

Next up is a potentially lopsided football test against Tennessee. And what is the loyal opposition’s rooting interest in the game?

"Over the years, a large number of kids at Rutgers have come to cheer for the opposition team," Dowling acknowledges. “So right now, we’re perfectly happy. We’d love to see Tennessee score 200 points against them."

Hey, Coach Schiano, in case you were wondering, the No. 1-ranked 'Canes are 4-0 and off this weekend.

Mike Fish is a senior writer for CNNSI.com.