Rutgers has hired William F. Tate IV as its new president, and since most of us here in New Jersey are unfamiliar with his work in the same job at Louisiana State, we reached out to the foremost expert on higher education south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Dr. Paul Finebaum.
Who else, right?
Finebaum, who holds advanced degrees in SEC-ology from multiple universities, has hosted the most influential college football talk show for decades. He doesn’t always ask for the college president to join him on the air when he cruises around the major campuses each fall — this is, after all, a sports show.
Tate was different. Tate was always welcome.
“We talk to a lot of people from higher education,” Finebaum said over the phone before his popular show on Monday afternoon. “He might be the most dynamic president I’ve ever spoken to. He is electric, he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s not someone who is afraid to say anything.”
For folks who have followed the ups and downs of the Scarlet Knights for a while, this is a point worth hammering home: Rutgers has hired a president who is comfortable talking college football with Paul Freakin’ Finebaum. Can you imagine predicting that, say, 10 or 15 years ago? You’d be laughed straight out of Middlesex County.
Plug Tate’s name into a YouTube search, and you’ll see clips of him revving up the crowd after LSU’s recent national championships in women’s basketball and gymnastics. Track his social-media presence, and you’ll scroll through dozens of posts about current and former athletes — and not just the cursory way-to-go messages.
This man genuinely seems to love college athletics, and in his first comments to reporters after the Rutgers Board of Governors approved his hire on Monday, Tate brought them up unprompted. He talked about the coming sea-change moment coming this summer when universities soon directly paying athletes and said that Rutgers “has a real opportunity because of the massive media market” in New Jersey. He already knows the right notes to hit for this audience.
It is hard to say how much impact a university president really has on sports success — and, these days, you’d much rather have a deep-pocketed booster sitting courtside than a pompom-waving academic. Still, Tate will be an important advocate for coaches Greg Schiano and Steve Pikiell as they work to elevate their programs.
But Tate — and everyone involved in hiring him — needs to understand this: Rutgers should not strive to be more like LSU.
The long-held goal for the Scarlet Knights was to be on par with Michigan or Cal-Berkley or Virginia, universities that win championships on the playing field and excel in the classroom. That’s the model, and while the goal remains a lofty one, the shifting landscape of college sports hasn’t changed it.
When it comes to academics, LSU isn’t even in the same ballpark as Rutgers. It was 179th in the latest U.S. News rankings — Rutgers was 41st — which is third from the bottom even in the SEC. "Geaux Rutgers!" sounds great on Saturdays, but from Monday to Friday, this university is far better than the one that Tate just left behind.
Tate soon will have to win over a Rutgers faculty that has fought the university’s pursuit of big-time college athletics at every turn. He will have to navigate the nasty Jersey politics as the ultimate Trenton outsider in a job that chewed up and spit out his predecessor, Jonathan Holloway, over the past five years.
Football might be the easy part of the job. Did Rutgers hire a president to run the university or to pump up the athletic department? We’ll know soon, but the latter is just part of the mission.
“A lot of presidents will sit in the end zone and act like they’re part of the band, but he really does fit in,” Finebaum said. “There’s no acting involved.”
One of his first tasks in his new job will be to select — or rubber stamp — a replacement for Patrick Hobbs as athletic director. That person will have a much more hands-on role in charting the course for the Scarlet Knights during these pivotal next few years, and Rutgers should not waste any more time to pick that leader given that nine months have passed since Hobbs resigned in scandal.
The president will have a hand in all the major decisions, and hopefully, Tate will do a better job than Holloway or predecessor Robert Barchi did in preventing an athletics scandal from torpedoing the national image of his new university. This ain’t Baton Rouge. People still care about that stuff. We think.
“One thing for sure, though: He has seen intercollegiate athletics at the highest level,” Finebaum said. “It’s cliche but it’s also accurate that going to a game on a Saturday night in Tiger Stadium is nirvana. He knows what it’s like to see the absolute best.”
If he brings a fraction of that success to Piscataway while maintaining the university’s standing as an institution of higher learning, he’ll have generations of Rutgers fans cheering for him.
MORE FROM STEVE POLITI:
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Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com.