Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice is on professional thin ice because of his red-hot temper and white-hot tongue.
Rice doesn’t want the ice beneath him to crack. His athletic director, Tim Pernetti, doesn’t want it to crack.
But The Post has learned all it will take is one crack, the slightest crack, and there almost surely will be a new basketball coach at Rutgers next season, or before the end of the current season.
On Thursday Pernetti suspended Rice for three games and fined him $50,000 for improper behavior and language during practices and games. The behavior included throwing basketballs at players’ heads and using demeaning and insulting language, including vulgar references to female genitalia.
The Post has learned Rice is now operating under a zero-tolerance policy. Every one of his practices and games will be monitored by a person independent of the basketball program and an active file on Rice’s behavior will be kept. That independent monitor has yet to be selected, said a Rutgers source.
Any off-color word or boorish behavior could be the icebreaker.
Rice also must undergo anger-management counseling.
Pernetti, a Rutgers grad, could not have been clearer. He wants Rice to remain his coach, but he will not jeopardize the reputation of the program.
Pernetti knew when he hired Rice three years ago — his first major hire as AD — that he was bringing in a volatile but successful coach. Fordham and Seton Hall had chances to hire Rice but shied away, in both cases, because of his fiery persona.
But Pernetti, after conferring with legendary high school coach Bob Hurley and other prep, AAU and college basketball personnel, hired Rice. Three years in, Pernetti knows just how volatile Rice can be.
When he was hired on May 6, 2010, Rice said, “We will build a program that everyone in the Rutgers family can be proud of.”
To that end, another source close to the situation said Rice was taking the suspension seriously and was resigned to doing whatever he can to change his ways. The source said Rice, who has two children, wants to do right by them and by Rutgers.
Pernetti needed no other motivation to take the decisive action he took. But the specter of other potentially embarrassing revelations about Rice’s behavior are lurking.
Rice did not retain Eric Murdock as his director of player development after last summer. According to a source, Murdock is seeking a settlement with the school and has been holding damaging video of Rice recorded over numerous practice sessions as his ace in the hole.
If nothing else, Pernetti just cut the legs out of Murdock’s case. But that’s not what drove Pernetti to this. It was as scarlet and white and Rutgers’ school colors. As much as he wants to see Rice succeed, Pernetti couldn’t accept the method of madness.