Going big time
There are no jets for recruiting at Rutgers. The athletics department doesn’t even own buses. When Rutgers teams travel, they sometimes depart their fragmented campus in anonymous, rented coach buses.
Rutgers’s main campus in New Brunswick is actually five smaller campuses spread across both sides of the Raritan River. Rutgers athletics is headquartered in Piscataway, not far from the football stadium that bills itself as “the birthplace of college football.”
On Nov. 6, 1869, Rutgers and Princeton clashed in the first recorded college football game, a 6-4 Rutgers win. Over the next 100 years, as college football grew more popular, Rutgers officials decided the school fit better outside the top tier.
In the early 1980s — after prodding by Sonny Werblin, an alum and owner of the New York Jets — Rutgers launched an effort to join the top level of college sports. Gone were the annual games against Princeton; it was replaced with tilts against Alabama and Penn State.
On the field, there hasn’t been much glory. The 2006 season is the high-water mark: an 11-2 record highlighted by a win over then-No. 3 Louisville, a game the school refers to as “Pandemonium in Piscataway.”
Off the field, financial success has proven even more difficult. Rutgers athletics has perennially lost lots of money, according to “Going Bigtime: The Rutgers Experience,” by the late Richard P. McCormick, a former history professor.
In the 1980s, Rutgers athletics annually lost hundreds of thousands; in the 1990s, the department annually lost millions; and in the 2000s, annual losses topped $10 million.
“Rutgers was not yet ready for bigtime — after thirty years!” McCormick wrote.
In 2004, Rutgers athletics deficit was $22.7 million, and the department needed $6.4 million in student fees and $10.5 million from the school to pay its bills. Two years later, Rutgers cut six sports to try to save money.
By 2014, the financial picture only worsened. The athletics deficit hit $36.4 million. To pay its athletics bills, Rutgers to diverted $26 million in school funds and charged students $10.3 million in fees, or about $326 for each of the 31,630 full-time undergraduate students in New Brunswick.
Rutgers Athletics Chief Financial Officer Janine Purcaro also said the school’s financial report to the NCAA presents an inaccurate picture. In 2014, for example, it included a $6.5 million charge the school will pay out over several years to leave the smaller American Athletic Conference for the wealthier Big Ten.
The conference switch, Rutgers athletics officials say, is the key to the program’s eventual success. In 2014, each full member of the Big Ten received at least a $27 million cut of the league’s revenue. By 2021 - when Rutgers becomes a full conference member - that payout could top $40 million per school, thanks to rising television contracts.
In the early 2020s, Purcaro projects, Rutgers athletics will finally be almost self-sustainable. Until then, though, the department could lose another $1oo million.
“The next four or five years will be challenging to difficult, financially,” said Hermann, the school’s athletic director. “But this [conference change] will allow our athletics department to become financially sustainable in a way that we never could have.”
The annual losses infuriate economics professor Mark Killingsworth, who has watched as the school of Arts and Sciences has cut classes and replaced full-time professors with adjuncts.
In March, Killingsworth wrote a scathing report on athletics spending — approved by the university’s senate, which has both student and faculty members — that demanded a five-year plan for athletics to become self-sufficient. That’s simply not possible, Purcaro said.
The financial struggles of Rutgers athletics is a long-running controversy on campus, and Purcaro and Killingworth are familiar adversaries. There is exactly one thing the two agree on: the department’s biggest problem is income, not spending.
“It’s not like they are spending like drunken sailors. They are just not generating nearly enough revenue,” Killingsworth said.
An examination of Rutgers’s athletics spending shows tuition, coaches’ pay, and front-office pay have all steadily increased in a decade, but one item has taken a massive jump. Facilities costs leapt from $2 million to $11 million, caused by increased upkeep and $6.5 million in annual debt after an expansion of the football stadium in 2009.
Donations were supposed to cover a chunk of that project. State Senator Ray Lesniak, a Rutgers alum and longtime athletics booster, joked Rutgers would raise $30 million with “one spin through Jon Corzine’s Rolodex,” referring to the wealthy, well-connected New Jersey governor.
That spin wasn’t quite so lucrative. Corzine donated $1 million, and after Rutgers struggled to raise anything else, the school ultimately borrowed the entire $102 million.
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