Fanshots

Tsimis Makes It Two Commits for the Day

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Best known for burning Rivals Top 50 Cornerback Yuri Wright, John Tsimis has joined today's commit Brick Ayres as the fourth member of the RU 2013 recruiting class. The knock on him was that he didn't have elite speed and was, at best, a possession receiver. The Bengals, I hear, are pretty happy with a guy named Mo Sanu. Tsimis is a flat out baller. Welcome to the Banks.

Dontae Ayres to Rutgers

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Quick: when you think of a short-but-powerfully built running back, which names immediately come to mind? On the plus side, there's Ray Rice of course, along with Ray Graham and Joe Morris if you go back a little. Of course, there was also the last "next Ray Rice" in De'Antwan Williams, who many still insist had all the physical tools to succeed. On paper, Ayres is cut from a similar mode. Think about it like this. Rutgers has a slasher in Jawan Jamison, a workhorse in Savon Huggins, and a sparkplug in Desmon Peoples. If roster balance is the key, you'd think next year they'd go for a bruising back that can run between the tackles, no? Then again, it seemed like for a while in the late aughts, Rutgers just kept signing scatback after scatback.

Brett McMurphy's horrible track record

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Brett McMurphy from CBS Sports has a track record of being consistently wrong about pretty much everything Big East - whether it's parroting the talking points of disgraced commissioner John Marinatto, or repeating ludicrous lies that Boise State was poised to stay in the Mountain West. McMurphy's latest disaster of an article speculates that the Big East next media deal will be flat. Even though it was already below market value in 2005 once the Big East proved that it wasn't total crap after the first ACC raid. Yes, the Big East lost a ton in basketball - it doesn't matter at all for television revenue, considering the conference is a lot better in football. This article might as well be a press release from ESPN. No, one can never predict who will leave the conference. If the lineup stays the same though, McMurphy will once again to be proven an unquestioning mouthpiece with no willingness at all to vet his biased sources.

Justin Goodwin commits to Rutgers football

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First Springfield, and now Madison. Rutgers is suddenly finding football players in areas where it used to only find accounting students. Goodwin only had offers from Big East programs UConn and Temple, so like Anthony Cioffi, he is a bit of an under the radar player (no surprise given his high school.) Still, Rutgers was willing to take him at this point with supposedly higher-ranked players still on the board. The staff has to have seen something that they liked. Given that Goodwin is a high school RB, his ultimate position is probably still up in the air for now.

Latest USA Today subsidy figures out

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It figures - this site has been citing these USA Today reports longer than anyone, and when the full 2011 data finally came out, things have been so hectic that I haven't really had time to look at them in depth until now. On one hand, it's really good that these numbers are out there as opposed to the fiction that most athletic departments make money. However, that last part cannot be stressed enough. Football drives the bus. When you look at sport-specific breakdowns, as Bloomberg provided last year, the spending problem at schools like Rutgers clearly isn't football. It's everything else. Rutgers certainly fares very poorly in these rankings, and the reasons are clear. The Big East's television contract is atrocious, which is why Tim Pernetti has no choice but to take direct control of Big East television negotiations. Rutgers also clearly is in the hole of having to make up for lost time in football. Not only do other programs already have decades of fan support to fall back on, but they also likely subsidized facility upgrades during boom years when no one was really looking, while Rutgers is still forced to play catchup for the early-90s expansion that was never completed as originally projected. The revenue numbers show that Kirk Ciarrocca driving the offense into the ground badly hurt revenue, which is no surprise. Losing, especially losing so egregious, will tend to do that. That goes to show why the Dowlings of the world really are off their rocker. Like it or not, Rutgers has chosen to go down the path of big-time athletics, At this point, the facilities are fixed costs that will exist either way, even though tuition is a pretty big factor too. If you even want to entertain the fantasy that football is the problem rather than too many olympic sports, if football suddenly disappears tomorrow, then the athletic department is in far worse fiscal shape due to those fixed costs still being in place.

JSBL Rosters Announced

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I'm a little late on this news because I was waiting to see if there'd be other news to pair this with, but since it's out there, time to put it up. The Rutgers basketball team will once again be participating in the Jersey Shore basketball league. Due to NCAA rules, the team all share one team, but be split up amongst the league. Even newcomer Vincent Garrett will compete. The only players missing are Kadeem Jack (who'll play in the city) and Austin Carroll. (h/t Matt Hladik)

George Norcross wins - Rutgers-Camden to join with Rowan.

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Did you really think Chris Christie would turn his back on the guy who has helped Christie pass bill after bill through a minority-Republican legislature? The only question seemingly remaining is what name the combined institution will take. As always, this blog's position is contrary to the prevailing sentiment - kind of. What is happening to Rutgers-Camden is a tragedy, but considering the re-acquisition of the unjustly stolen UMDNJ-New Brunswick, the deal is still a considerable gain for Rutgers in New Brunswick. HOWEVER, the merged institution MUST NOT be allowed to bear the Rutgers name under ANY circumstances if it is not fully bound to the Rutgers Board of Governors. Let's face it - the combined Rutgers-Camden/Rowan will be a clown college that will solely exist as a patronage mill for George Norcross. Students and academics will flee in droves as he pillages the university for all resources to prop up his failed and bankrupt medical school, driving the institution into the ground as Norcross has with the rest of his fiefdom in Camden. Given that certainty, the combined institution must not be allowed to sully the independent reputation and academic prestige of Rutgers University under any circumstances. Keeping a foreign entity as part of Rutgers will create a cancer; Rut-Row must be expunged before its sickness and precedent of politics taking precedence over academics can be allowed to spread and cause further damage and decay.

Rutgers football post-spring depth chart released

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As expected, there was no resolution at QB/RB/TE, but the other spots have some movement. WR: Brandon Coleman and Mark Harrison are your starters over Wright, Pratt, and Deering. Miles Shuler isn't on the depth chart at all. Can we please redshirt him? OL: Johnson and Dill as bookend starters were expected, as was Bujari over Hendrikson at C. Alexander is starting RG, while LG looks like Lowery vs. Osei. Matt McBride and Devon Watkis round out the depth chart. DE: Awww, no Issaka? DT: Ken Kirksey isn't on the depth chart, but he did miss most of the spring. Currently - Ike Holmes is starting at NT, which means Scott Vallone goes back to his natural 3-technique position. Al Page or Marquise Wright could be the next noses, while Jamal Merrell moves inside to back up Vallone. You wonder if that sticks, or he goes back to DE when Kirksey is healthy. Either way, where does Darius Hamilton fit in in the fall? LB: Kevin Snyder and Quentin Gause looking good were known commodities. Robert Joseph is the third LB apparently, or at least until Quanzilla gets here (assuming Quanzilla isn't a DE, which is far from a given.) Or maybe Longa? DB: Waters holds off Warren at SS, with Mase Robinson coming back as the nickel CB. It's Glashen vs. Cooper for the dime back spot, and J.T. Tartacoff against Rashad Knight for backup FS. It'll be nice to see what Tejay Johnson can do in the fall if healthy.

Big East/Marinatto lies continue

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The above story from Brett McMurphy is just pathetic in the way that the quoted sources are blatantly lying. The Big East would have been fine if everyone would have just gone along with Marinatto's below-market value ESPN deal? That's like saying everything would have been fine if everyone just kept kissing Providence's ass, which is exactly what history's greatest monster, Mike Tranghese, thinks we all should have kept doing. It's 100% true that John Marinatto, inept and bumbling as he was, was merely intended to be a tool for the likes of Providence. How does that make him in anyway a sympathetic figure? He got exactly what he deserved, and so did the Big East for that matter! The guy was given a first and goal and was tackled for a safety. The question becomes though, why did the basketball schools finally dismiss their puppet who so faithfully did their bidding? Maybe because the writing is on the wall, and they knew that a loser like Marinatto wasn't capable of negotiating with the likes of ESPN and NBC Sports. Still, just because they realized the error of that mistake three years too late doesn't mean that they will suddenly go for a man of vision like Tim Pernetti as the next commissioner. The problem with the Big East is the dead weight, and the likes of Providence won't like hearing that they are the problem holding the Big East back. They are not going to go from the single-least qualified person for the job in Marinatto to the single-most qualified candidate in Tim Pernetti. That's not their style, and the only reason that the possibility is even being contemplated today was because jettisoning the feeble Marinatto was so out of character to begin with. No, the same idiots who got us in to this mess will never accept Pernetti as commissioner. With any luck though, he will be in charge of negotiating the next conference television deal, if not finding the next league commissioner. Of course, if they had only listened to him a year ago in expanding aggressively, dumping Marinatto, telling Villanova football to get lost, and taking a hard line with ESPN, then the Big East would be in a position of strength today rather than fighting for its life.

Big East dismisses ineffective, incompetent, deadweight commissioner

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It's unfortunate that the Big East didn't do this a year ago when it might have actually done some good, but the ineffective and unqualified John Marinatto has finally been removed from his post. Now is the time for the Big East to purge any remnants of factions loyal to Marinatto/Tranghese/Gavitt. Marinatto should have never been hired in the first place over Kevin Weiberg or Nick Carparelli. Right now, the Big East's non-football programs to need to sit down, shut up, and get the hell out of the way while real men of action like Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti take charge of ongoing television rights negotiations. That's why Marinatto had to go now. You can't have some cronyist nitwit signing off on a crappy deal that would consign Big East football programs to poverty. It's time to play hardball, and whether the non-football schools get lost in the shuffle should be the least of the league's concerns. Now, if the conference wasn't being run by morons who hate football and making profits, we could have just listened to Pernetti a year ago and not seen the conference thrown into turmoil. Update: this ESPN report is laughably bad in many respects.