Rutgers president Robert Barchi deflected all responsibility for not firing coach Mike Rice in November, and says he didn’t watch the video of Rice’s physical and verbal abuse of players until 10 p.m. Tuesday night – more than seven hours after ESPN aired it and replayed it over and over.
In a press conference Thursday, Barchi said athletic director Tim Pernetti gave him the compilation DVD of Rice’s practices Tuesday morning, but he didn’t get a chance to watch it until later that night in Pernetti’s office because he had “six hours of face-to-face meetings in front of hundreds of people” and the DVD would not work on his laptop.
Meanwhile, the video went viral online and was shown on every major news network. You couldn’t turn on the television Tuesday without seeing Rice toss a basketball at a player’s head.
PERNETTI RESIGNS WITH SCATHING LETTER
When Barchi finally did see the footage, he determined that Rice “had to be fired.” Pernetti said it would be done by morning.
“I fired him, not for cause,” Barchi said of Rice. “I just fired him.”
The president, who has been in place for seven months, said he didn’t watch the video in November when it was first brought to the school’s attention because he entrusted Pernetti, the school’s counsel and an outside counsel with advising him how to penalize Rice. Pernetti, who resigned Thursday, said in a statement that his gut told him to fire Rice when he initially saw the video, but Rutgers overruled him.
“I don’t recall any statements to me that his first intincts were to fire him,” Barchi said of Pernetti. … “He was certainly counseled and received that counsel. It was his prerogative to make a forceful case with me if he felt differently.”
Barchi said he wished he had seen the video back in November, but said it was the “responsibility” of the people around him to bring to him an assessment of the situation. He said their assessment did not accrurately reflect what happened in practices.
“It’s easy to say I could have and should have,” Barchi said. “What I heard was my chief counsel was there looking at it and giving his expert opinion and an outside counsel and my AD.”
Allegations against Rice were initially made over the summer by former director of player development Eric Murdock. Murdock brought the damning footage to Pernetti in November and an investigation began. Rice was suspended three games and fined $50,000 for physically accosting players, yelling homophobic slurs and tossing basketballs at them.
“I did not see anything in the video when I actually reviewed it that was out of keeping with what I was told,” Barchi said. “What I did see was evidence of pervasive behavior over a long period of time that went over whatever threshold I would have had and gave me a different view of what was going on.”
Pernetti did numerous interviews Tuesday with television, radio and print reporters. He said in many of them that Barchi had seen the video. Barchi said the now former athletic director assumed that he had watched the DVD given to him in the morning, but that was not the case.
Barchi said that he “can’t exactly say why” he didn’t watch the video in the nearly four months since Murdock brought it to the school’s attention. Instead, he passed blame to those underneath him for not firing Rice in November,
“It was my responsibility to listen to that assessment and that advice and determine what action to take,” Barchi said. “At the time I did all those things and that’s the determination I made.”
mraimondi@nypost.com