Hello there, Rutgers, and welcome to the Big Ten, where your embarrassing PR disaster that’s being dubbed a scandal — though it really is more so just another case of athletic hubris gone wild — is mere small potatoes.

It’s obviously not OK for a coach to hurl vicious and profane insults — and basketballs — at his players. The coach in this case, Mike Rice, should be beyond fired. The athletic director, Tim Pernetti, should be ousted for not taking swifter action on the coach. But the university president, Robert Barchi, should not be expected to police the conduct of his basketball coach in a practice setting and should not be forced to resign from the university.

Eric Murdock, Rutgers’ former director of player development who compiled the tape and was subsequently fired, informed Pernetti of Rice’s behavior last summer. The half-hour compilation showed Rice aggressively shoving and throwing basketballs at his players, using any of the curse words you would have learned from your resident middle school bully.

After the video of the practices was obtained, Pernetti described it to Barchi and now says he wanted to fire Rice, but was overruled by Barchi and “general counsel.” Barchi, who was hired in September, was never shown the video until this past week.

Keep in mind here, we’re a president away from matching the house-cleaning effort that went with Penn State’s notorious sexual assault cover-up that broke in 2011. The gravity of that travesty was understanding that the scandal was not about sports, but about using sports to conduct wicked, traumatizing pedophilic activity that doubled as an overt felony. The behavior was reported to the university president, Graham Spanier, and he did nothing. Barchi, similarly, did not intervene when he heard that his basketball coach was more or less being a mean guy. While Rice’s behavior was certainly misconduct, it was not illegal. 

At least 50 members of Rutgers’ faculty are now calling for Barchi’s firing over this particular scandal, and, albeit inadvertently, turning this event to one comparable to the Penn State scandal that cost the coach, athletic director and university president their jobs. 

Faculty members were calling for Barchi’s resignation even before the athletic director stepped down. That means one of two things: either they blamed Barchi more than Pernetti, or they wanted Barchi gone for some other reason.

I’m no expert on administrative business at Rutgers University, but I’m aware that they’re merging two of the three schools from University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (the other will be ceded to Camden). Faculty members had concerns over a lack of hiring in the school of arts and sciences departments — Barchi’s administration was trying to save funding to help the merger. Barchi was hired this past September to help lead the school through the merger, and his focus on completing it has led to his perception as a careless, dismissive leader.

Former Illinois president Michael Hogan stepped down last year due to poor leadership and a bad relationship with faculty. Barchi seems to be fitting those requirements, but whereas Hogan looked bad in wake of an email scandal last year, Barchi’s been diligently executing this merger, which is the most important task for the current Rutgers president.

So here we have a House of Cards-like political ploy from faculty members at Rutgers to try and oust the school president for something only tangentially related to issues that really concern them. You want to tell me that economics professor Thomas Prusa, who was quoted in Friday edition of The New York Times calling for Barchi’s firing, gives a damn about the mental health of the men’s basketball team? The man teaches economics, not psychology. I’m calling BS. 

Prusa was quoted saying the following: “Maybe if the president was more tuned in, he would think that we have 58,000 students, 18 to 22 years old, and what exactly is happening? He is throwing balls at students’ heads? And he’s calling them what? He was not interested in that.”

And what if he was “interested in that?” The Rutgers faculty wouldn’t ask why he’s paying attention to matters the athletic director should handle capably while the College of Arts and Sciences has its faculty’s concerns ignored time and again? 

I don’t have any reason to support Barchi, and I’m not writing on his behalf; he doesn’t matter to me. I’m writing on behalf of sports. The faculty members at Rutgers are attempting to exploit the popularity of athletics to initiate a move they want made for other reasons. Their deepest concerns with Barchi are irrelevant to the basketball team, and for them to use this debacle to call for his firing is a premeditated lie.

With hoops season over, the Rutgers faculty is now playing games of a political nature. And it’s cheap.

This is the Big Ten — we know the difference between sports and nonsports issues. Rice’s actions are a basketball issue, not one of incompetence by the academic leadership that rightfully has its focus elsewhere. It’s shameful for Prusa and his fellow faculty members to try and blur the line between sports and life, given the context of their new conference.

Maybe Barchi does deserve to be fired, but not for the wild antics of a basketball coach.

Eliot is a junior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.