Media, Mike Rice, and The Trials of College Athletics
Thirty-five years after legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes was fired for punching an opposing player, the videotaped outbursts and subsequent firing of Rutgers University men’s basketball coach Mike Rice brought the topic of coaching abuse back into the national limelight. On April 2, 2013, ESPN’s respected “Outside the Lines” released video footage of Rutgers University men’s basketball coach Mike Rice physically and verbally abusing players during practice. This footage, provided by former NBA player and recently fired Rutgers director of player development Eric Murdock, showed Rice kicking, grabbing, shoving players, as well as throwing basketballs directed at players’ heads, feet, and legs. Rice was also seen yelling profanities at players, and often spewed homophobic and misogynistic slurs.
Released during the NCAA’s Men’s Basketball tournament, Rice’s videotaped outbursts became the talk of the tournament and the sports world at large. Even star athletes such as LeBron James took to social media to share their disgust with the video. With intense media scrutiny focused on New Jersey’s flagship public university, Rice was fired, as was Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti, who had suspended Rice for three games the previous December after viewing the footage.
The scandal tarnished the image of a school eager to gain athletic prominence and respectability. Just months earlier, Rutgers joined the powerful Big Ten Conference, which promises to provide the often-financial strapped program a constant flow of television dollars and stability. Instead of celebrating its move toward a brighter athletic future, Rutgers was forced to confront a coaching abuse scandal which exposed the failure of top administrators to act in the best interest of their students.
The scandal at Rutgers provided the media an opportunity to further examine and critique the ills of college athletics. According to Daniel Libit of the Columbia Journalism Review, newspapers and other media outlets since the 1980s have helped to expose corruption and cheating at schools such as SMU, Ohio State, Miami, USC, and Washington.
Though Libit argued that the “Scandal Beat” has been successful in legitimatizing the sports page as a site for serious reporting, he also argued the same beat hindered the possibility of a reform movement within college sports. Libit noted that while stories of corruption and cheating focus heavily on the actions of transgressors and their punishment, they often ignore the underlying causes of these problems, mainly a system of amateurism where coaches routinely are paid six or seven figure salaries despite the fact that student-athletes cannot get paid at all.
Besides the issue of amateurism and the unequal balance of power between college coaches and their players, the Rice scandal presented the media with an opportunity to critique other problematic aspects of big-time college athletics. The disgraced coach’s use of homophobic language exposed the lingering problem of homophobia and college sports. Rice’s tough guy antics also called into question the motivational tactics of coaches trained in the old-school, win-at-all-costs mentality of Vince Lombardi and Bear Bryant, among other coaching legends.
In a study I conducted for the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland, I examined the discourse surrounding the Rice scandal in both the print media and online outlets such as SportsIllustrated.com and ESPN.com. I paid particularly close attention to the ensuing discussion about what caused the outbursts. For example, discussions about the unequal relationship between amateur student-athletes and highly-paid coaches would suggest that, contrary to Libit’s piece, journalists are indeed willing to engage in a conversation about a failed college athletics system which breeds constant scandal. On the other hand, a singular focus on Rice would suggest that he was an out-of-control outlier who did not represent the true spirit of college basketball.
To gauge how much, if any, progress has been made in coverage of coaching abuse, the coverage of the Rice scandal was also compared to coverage of the two most famous firings tied to coaching abuse at the collegiate level: Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight’s 2000 firing after years of abusive behavior, and Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes’ 1978 firing after he punched a Clemson player who intercepted a pass toward the end of that season’s Gator Bowl.
The project’s results suggested that the sports media has begun to challenge the amount of power and control college coaches have over their players. Far from supporting Rice as a disciplinarian like Vince Lombardi or other legendary coaches, journalists denounced the embattled coach as a bully and abuser unworthy of college coaching. Bill Rhoden of the New York Times linked Rice’s behavior to the old school mentality of football coach Bear Bryant; though Bryant’s abusive behavior toward players has now been widely denounced, Rhoden felt that the Rice case demonstrated the modern-day college coach still has too much leeway in what they can do to motivate their student-athletes.
Other writers also made a connection between the power disparity between high-paid coaches and amateur athletes. Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News attacked the current state of affairs within college coaching, believing that coaches’ status as the headliners of the sport caused Rice to act without accountability. Liz Clarke of the Washington Post noted that though the players help to generate revenue for their athletic programs, they are not given the same rights as employees of a corporation. In discussing the rights of student-athletes, Clarke linked Rice’s actions to an unfair system where athletes fleeing an abusive coach have to give up a year of eligibility.
Journalists also were not afraid to link the controversy at Rutgers to the misplaced priorities of college coaches and administrators. The Washington Post’s Jason Reid believed Rutgers acted too late in firing Rice, calling Rice’s suspension and $50,000 fine “pathetic” and taking Pernetti and other Rutgers administrators to task for wanting to protect the brand of Rutgers athletics rather than do what’s right; Reid then connected the inaction at Rutgers to the cover-up of sexual abuse at Penn State, where again, program image took precedent over justice for victims. Similarly, noted NCAA critic Joe Nocera of the New York Times believed the Rutgers scandal was symbolic of the ills of college athletics, as the school compromised their values for entry into the Big Ten and the promise of increased television revenue.
Finally, Rice received the most considerable flack for his use of homophobic slurs against players. To many writers, Rice’s slurs were particularly galling when considering that just three years before, Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committed suicide after being harassed because of his sexual orientation. By connecting Rice’s comments to a previous campus tragedy, journalists were able to show the discontent between the Rutgers athletic department and other administrators and the rest of campus. One of the stronger condemnations of Rutgers leadership came from Christine Brennan of USA Today, who called for the firing of both Rutgers President Robert Barchi and Pernetti, believing the two administrators “failed Clementi’s memory” in deciding not to fire Rice once they learned of his behavior in December of 2012.
To be sure, some aspects of coverage surrounding the Rice scandal were problematic. For example, though the media emphatically condemned Rice’s homophobic remarks to his players, the constant linking between Clementi and Rice helped to construct homophobia as a problem unique to Rutgers. Though the scandal definitely provided an opportunity for it, most newspapers did not have a larger discussion about sports and sexual orientation. One notable exception were Alfred Doblin’s columns in the Bergen Record. In one column, Doblin made the connection between Rice and Clementi, but went one step further and challenged the continued homophobia of professional American sports, citing them as one of society’s most hostile institutions for gay men.
Furthermore, while the media denounced Rutgers’ singular focus on conference affiliation and television revenue, journalists still were focused on promoting the importance of winning and moving to a better conference. Rice’s abysmal 44-51 record during his three years at Rutgers was frequently mentioned within articles and columns about the scandal; to some writers, Rice was unworthy of a major coaching job based off of this fact alone.
Instead of calling for Rutgers to deemphasize athletics, some journalists viewed the school’s admission into the Big Ten as an anecdote for the troubled athletic program. Tara Sullivan of the Bergen Record saw a reason for optimism as the school moved from the Big East to the Big Ten, with a new start opening up the possibility that the school can move past the disastrous Rice tenure. Far from telling the school to deemphasize athletics, Sullivan suggested Rutgers hire a big-time coach like Wright to create a buzz around the program as it entered Big Ten play.
One glaring aspect of the Rice scandal was the relative lack of coverage from publications after Rice was suspended in December. Besides a handful of columns in the local New York and New Jersey newspapers, the news of Rice’s suspension garnered only wire reports or brief mentions in other publications. The video showing Rice’s abuse would be released three months later. Still, the emphasis on Rice’s win-loss record suggests that perhaps Rutgers simply wasn’t a big enough program for media outlets across the country to focus on.
Even with these problems, however, coverage of the Rice scandal still proved that the sports media is more willing to link college scandals to more systemic issues plaguing college sports. Perhaps the biggest difference in the coverage of Rice’s scandal and the coverage of both Knight and Hayes was the emphasis in linking Rutgers’ negligence to the chase of Big Ten money. While commentators discussing Knight and Hayes were worried about the cult of the coach and the influence of big-time sports on college campuses, commentators covering the Rice scandal analyzed a college sports landscape increasingly driven by conference realignment and television revenue. In light of these developments, and in the aftermath of the Penn State scandal, journalists were perhaps more likely to critique not only the major actors of the Rutgers scandal, but also the misplaced priorities of college sports in general.
Justin Hudson is a doctoral student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
