Rutgers Football

Interesting Article in the New York Times on Rutgers, which goes to a bowl game this year for the first time since 1978, finishing3rd in the Big East. Interesting because it references the less than happy faculty. Those that want to improve football at SMU, this is the kind of attitude you are working against:

Not everyone is as enthused. Norman Levitt, a mathematics professor who supported the Rutgers 1000 movement, said Monday that he still thought success in sports could undermine academic ambitions.

"The prominence of the athletic department and the ridiculous salaries to coaches is demoralizing to most of the faculty," Levitt said in a telephone interview. He called major college football "minor league, semi-pro football" that benefits the N.F.L.

That the team wears the name of the university on its shirts is merely "an interesting sociological fact," Levitt said. When asked about the performance of the Rutgers players in the A.P.R. ratings, Levitt said, "I teach a couple hundred kids a year in second-year mathematics, and I don't recall ever having seen a football player or basketball player in one of my classes."