Should Rutgers Fire Head Coach Kyle Flood?
For Rutgers University, the hits keep coming.
On Wednesday, Rutgers University suspended head football coach Kyle Flood for three games and fined him $50,000 for violations of university policy.
Flood was being investigated by the University for contacting a faculty member about a player’s academic status. That player was junior cornerback Nadir Barnwell.
University president Robert Barchi told ESPN that Flood “circumvented established policies and procedures” by emailing a faculty member and scheduling an in-person meeting to discuss Barnwell’s academic standing.
You can read the full report from the university-led investigation here.
The investigation, which was first reported by NJ.com, discovered that Flood contacted Barnwell’s professor through a personal email so that he could avoid public-records requests, even though he was told by an academic adviser on staff at the university that he is not allowed to do that under university policy.
He also told the professor that he purposely didn’t wear Rutgers apparel so he wouldn’t be recognized in public while meeting with the professor.
Those weren’t the only problems with this situation, either. When the professor agreed to review an additional paper to help Barnwell’s standing in class, Flood helped Barnwell by providing “grammatical and minor editorial suggestions” to the paper.
Flood will miss Saturday’s game at Penn State, a Sept. 26 matchup with Kansas at home and an Oct. 10 trip to Michigan State. Associate head coach Norries Wilson will serve as the interim coach for those games.
This is sadly not the first incident that the Rutgers athletic department has had to deal with in recent memory.
It seems that Rutgers is becoming a laughing stock in the world of college sports because of their many issues with their athletic programs. That thought is shockingly agreed upon by many students that attend the university.
Adya Beasley, a multimedia reporter for NJ.com, went around campus asking students about the incident and, as she puts it in her story you can find here, she found “very little sympathy for the program’s head coach or his players.”
It looks like Rutgers’ athletic program is slowly spinning out of control, and one way to stop the downhill spiral might be by firing Flood, as Jon Solomon of CBS Sports says in this piece.
Firing Flood is something that president Barchi has considered. Although it seems unlikely at the moment, that may be the best way to start regaining the trust of their fans and turn the athletic department back in the right direction.
