Shades of Red: Part 2

Still curious about Rutgers-Nebraska comparisons, I stumbled on a short biography of former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne in a book I just finished called 100 Heroes: People in Sports Who Make This a Better World.

It led me to collect a little more information about this Hall of Fame coach, which I’d like to share with the online audience. The Rutgers 1000 really picked the wrong school to pick on.

First, are Osborne’s football accomplishments, after 25 years as head coach at the University of Nebraska.

• Two undisputed national titles
• 25 Top 15 rankings
• 12 Big Eight Conference titles
• 1 Big 12 Conference title
• 255 career wins

More interesting were his accomplishments off the field. Osborne came to Nebraska in 1960, not only as an assistant coach, but also as the team’s first academic counselor. Thirty years later, his teams had compiled an 82 percent graduation rate; that’s higher than the regular student bodies at most colleges and universities in the country, let alone football players. Nebraska has graduated 65 Academic All American football players since 1962, an outstanding performance as well. As of 2006, nine years since Osborne’s retirement from coaching, Nebraska football had an 88 percent graduation rate, best in their conference.

Osborne and his wife Nancy also started a statewide mentoring program called Husker TeamMates, which has 73 active chapters and neighboring Iowa. TeamMates started in 1991 when twenty-two Husker football players met with middle school students in the Lincoln Public Schools. Coach Osborne felt that the athletes in his program could make an impact on the middle school students.

According to its website, TeamMates has successful partnerships with local school districts from the largest urban schools to some of the smallest and most isolated rural schools, matching a student with an adult volunteer mentor to provide one hour of individual mentoring each week during the school year. Activities during the mentoring hour range from homework assignments to sharing common interests or simply engaging in conversation. This year, over 3,000 youths, grades 4-12, have mentors through TeamMates.

In 2000, Osborne was elected to Congress with 80 percent of the vote from his Lincoln district. That year, he became the first college football coach to receive the Jim Thorpe Lifetime Achievement Award. Presented by the Jim Thorpe Association without consideration of athletic accomplishments, the award recognizes a lifetime of achievement by people who “set the living examples that influence others to strive for the highest goals and leadership of men, and who blaze the trails of accomplishments which leave behind the pathways of tradition for others to follow.”

Osborne is one of only seven men and women who have received this award since the Association was founded in 1986.

Only 40, Rutgers’ coach Greg Schiano is a young man; he has plenty of time to build an equally impressive resume. He is well on his way, not only because he has helped turn around a football program, but also because he is well aware of the students and the community around him.

Being a Rutgers football season ticket holder, I can give one small example. At the close of last week’s game, a decisive win, Coach Schiano brought his team over to the student section of the stadium to join their classmates and the chorus in the singing of “On the Banks of the Old Raritan,” Rutgers’ alma mater. It meant a lot to see our team celebrate the win with their fellow students, as if they were a “12th man” on the field. This is only one of the small details I’ve seen since Greg Schiano became our coach, and it’s only on the football field. I know other fans know more.

Rutgers took a chance on Greg Schiano, much the same as Nebraska did with Tom Osborne. They brought on a young man who understood the importance of having quality people put a quality product on the field. According to the American Football Coaches Association, Rutgers has posted a three-year NCAA Academic Performance Rate (APR) of 971, the best mark of any state university nationally as well as the top mark of any school in its conference.

I hope the Rutgers 1000’s Hubie Cornpone award died when the organization did. Nebraska provides a model for the kind of football program most universities, and their community, would love to have. They deserve a lot more than to be the butt of stupid and ignorant comments such as those that were made by my fellow members of the Rutgers community.

New Jerseyans, more than others, should appreciate what it feels like to be the butt of jokes. I know I’ve heard “which exit?” and comments about dirty factories a few times too often.

If you live in the Garden State, I’m sure you have too.

Shades of Red

From time to time, I would like to write about colleges and universities from the perspective of studying Rutgers University, my alma mater and school I know best. I have earned two degrees from Rutgers and formed successful professional relationships with university administrators.

According to the latest U.S. News America’s Best Colleges, Rutgers’ flagship campus in New Brunswick ranks tied for 20th among publicly-supported research universities. This is impressive, considering Rutgers ranks ahead of universities that have much larger endowments and longer histories as public institutions. I know alumni who are disappointed in Rutgers’ ranking; they believe Rutgers is closer to a private Ivy League school than a “Public Ivy” such as the University of Virginia or UC-Berkeley.

When I entered Rutgers in the fall of 1978, the university’s football schedule included Penn State, but also Colgate, Yale, Princeton, William and Mary and other schools that are part of the NCAA’s so-called “Championship Subdivision,” a silly name for programs with small stadiums (less than 40,000 seats) that play-off for a national championship. By my senior year, Rutgers had played not only Penn State, but also Boston College, Pittsburgh and Syracuse; this was the only season we lost more games than we won while I was in college. I attended the last Rutgers-Princeton game play in “our house.” I still meet alumni who say they were at that game –and they miss the rivalry, which has been over for 27 years.

When I hear these comments I wonder who college football programs belong to: the students or the alumni. However, I also ask myself, are we really the equal of the schools we played? Having an Ivy League school on a football schedule didn’t grant us equal status by association. At the same time, Rutgers’ academic reputation has not fallen because our chief rivals in football are now Louisville and West Virginia.

Rutgers, like other large state universities, has its athletic boosters. However, it’s rare to see students, alumni and faculty organize an initiative to oppose them.

Rutgers professor William Dowling was an academic leader of the Rutgers 1000, a group dedicated to an ideal: that Rutgers drop scholarship football and invest in top-performing academic candidates, the high-SAT and academic achievers who would ordinarily choose an Ivy League school. The Rutgers 1000 campaigned for ten years, from January 1993 through December 2002.

It’s rare to see a group like the Rutgers 1000 within a state university community, and rarer still, for such a group to have had so much staying power. Student leaders graduate, alumni move on as work and family responsibilities dominate more of their lives. It’s safe for me say that faculty support and alumni memories kept the Rutgers 1000 going, but the Internet brought the news coverage necessary to advance their cause. Professor Dowling wrote Confessions of a Spoilsport, a recently released book chronicling Rutgers’ entry into major college football and the birth, rise and fall of the Rutgers 1000.

As a Rutgers alumnus, and a former board member of the business school’s alumni association, I was familiar with the Rutgers 1000. They made some valid points: football has no connection to the intellectual climate of a university; the sport is costly and rarely profitable, even for the major powers; and, the desire to win becomes a dangerous obsession when athletes, coaches, athletic

directors and boosters run uncontrolled.

Dowling also mentions that the campus newspaper and alumni magazine suppressed the group; the magazine refused to accept an ad from them. I agree with Professor Dowling’s position here, too: dissenting opinions on college campuses must never be suppressed. Colleges exist to encourage people to think and form their own ideas, not tow a party line en masse.

However, the Rutgers 1000 shot themselves in the foot; they weakened their case, stating that big-time football would corrupt and degrade the university—because schools of lesser academic stature would be on our schedule. They used the University of Nebraska as an example of how Rutgers could be “lowered” to the academic standards of a “football school.”

To be fair, I believe the Rutgers 1000 was quite concerned about the character and academic backgrounds of the athletes recruited by major college football programs. I do not believe that they meant to imply that the “bad apples” reflected badly on the academic reputation of another university.

However, someone in the Rutgers 1000 came up with the Hubie Cornpone Award, using a caricature of the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ mascot, to present to the sportswriter who was most likely to bring Rutgers down to the level of the University of Nebraska. That’s when things got out of hand, at least to me.

After reading Professor Dowling’s book, I got curious. I wanted to make some non-football comparisons between Rutgers and Nebraska. It was interesting on one level: both Rutgers and Nebraska have the same school colors, red and white, and fans wear red on game day. However, Rutgers says scarlet is the official color, while Nebraska says Big Red. Therefore, I’ll call this comparison The Shades of Red.

I went to published sources: the Yale Daily News College Guide, U.S. News and the Chronicles of Higher Education. Here’s what I found:

+ Endowment (university system): Nebraska $1.2 billion, Rutgers $550 million

+ In-state tuition (main campus): Nebraska $5,867, Rutgers $9,958

+ Out of State students (main campus): Nebraska 14%, Rutgers 7%

+ R&D Expenditures, Science and Engineering (university system): Nebraska $333 million, Rutgers $310 million

+ National Merit Scholars entering in 2006 (main campus): Nebraska 60, Rutgers less than 30

+ Yield rate (percentage of admitted freshman who accept offers of admission to the main campus): Nebraska 65%, Rutgers 33%

+ Number of undergraduate students (main campus): Nebraska 17,000, Rutgers 24,000

It appears that Nebraska fans bleed red on game day, but their university is fiscally speaking, less red than Rutgers.

In his book, Dowling ignores that in 1989, under former president Francis Lawrence, a man he consistently vilifies, Rutgers became a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The University of Nebraska had been a member for 80 years before Rutgers got the call!

These comparisons are remarkable, considering there are about 1.8 million people living in Nebraska versus 8.7 million in New Jersey. The Garden State has a much larger tax and corporate base to support a flagship state university than the Cornhusker State.

The Rutgers community has much to be proud of in their flagship university; very few research institutions attain top 20 rankings in football and academic performance at the same time. Rutgers is new to this lofty perch, but the university community must act like it belongs there, instead of ridiculing comparable institutions.

Otherwise, we fall further behind Nebraska in the games that really count.