Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
It’s been a little over a decade since Rutgers joined forces with the Big Ten after scrambling to find a new home in the wake of the collapse of the Big East. That ended up being a very costly decision for a school that has not fared well since making the leap, and one alum is suing to stop the athletic department from adding to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt it’s accumulated.
Rutgers will always have a spot in football history as one of the two teams that took part in the first game that was ever played at the collegiate level; the Scarlet Knights faced off against what is now Princeton while earning a 6-4 victory on November 6, 1869.
However, the school never came close to being a powerhouse in that pastime (or, for that matter, any other sport).
It somewhat hilariously claims a share of a national championship along with Princeton for the 1869 season after the only two college football programs in existence that year won one game apiece, but that’s its only one on that front.
Rutgers currently sponsors 24 sports, and while a handful of student-athletes have won a handful of individual titles in sports including wrestling, fencing, and track and field over the past few decades, a team hasn’t secured one in a competition sponsored by the NCAA since men’s fencing brought one home all the way back in 1949.
The university’s athletic department has only seen things get worse since linking up with the Big Ten in 2014, and one alumnus is fed up to the point where he felt the need to file a lawsuit to curb the spending that has failed to produce any real results.
Rutgers is being sued by a former student who wants the state of New Jersey to approve the athletic department’s expenditures
Most of the sports at Rutgers were affiliated with the Atlantic 10 when the football team gave up its independence to join the Big East in 1991, and the school became a full member four years later.
The athletic department found itself searching for an exit plan in the wake of the realignment that rocked the conference at the start of the 2010s, and in 2014, it found a new home with the Big Ten. However, that marked the start of what has been a pretty underwhelming era so far.
Its football team has posted a 52-93 record over the past 12 seasons while going 2-2 in the bowl games the Scarlet Knights have earned a spot in. The men’s basketball team made the NCAA Tournament in 2021 and 2022, but it only managed to get a single win (the same can be said for a women’s team that’s punched its ticket to March Madness three times since the transition).
Last year, the school’s athletic department ran up a $78 million deficit, which means it is now sitting at $516 million in the red since joining the Big Ten. Former LSU administrator Keli Zinn was hired to serve as the new athletic director and try to clean up some up the mess ex-AD Pat Hobbs helped create before he resigned over an undisclosed relationship with a gymnastics coach at the university, but that will be much easier said than done.
According to NJ.com, Rutgers is now facing another headache courtesy of a class-action lawsuit that was filed by Hector Rodriguez, an attorney, former judge, and member of the Class of 1975 who is suing to “halt the ongoing waste and unlawful diversion of public funds” linked to Rutgers athletics.
The filing argues that “continued subsidization of athletics deficits with public funds” violates New Jersey law. It is also angling for an audit of the athletic department’s finances, a ruling that would require the state’s legislature to approve expenditures moving forward, and the restitution of funds that may have been misappropriated.
This is just the first step in what could be a lengthy legal battle, but it may be worth keeping an eye on.