WHY THE HELL HASN'T MIKE RICE BEEN FIRED YET?

Your honor, I present to you Exhibit A, this video...

Your honor, I now present to you Exhibit B, this cum stain's record...

 

I have no problem with them firing him, but I think they're going to wind up having to pay him for his whole contract, which they might not have if they'd handled it differently.

Maybe they were planning on doing that anyway.

 

Ohh, and Rice isn't in any union and I'm pretty sure New Jersey is an at-will employment state.

 

You are looking at it wrong.
It's not that got to keep his job X number of extra months. It is he is not without a job - after having already been disciplined.
Who would hire the guy now?

This sort of things has happened here with the county school system. .. It didn't end well for the county.

 

Well, we all know that both parties would never let it get that far. Rutgers doesn't want to go to court and explain why they didn't fire him when it happened and Rice doesn't want to go through it again either.

They'll reach a nice settlement and neither side will be allowed to talk about it again.

 

There's no tenure at Rutgers?

 

Is he a state employee? I'm asking because I don't know. I thought some schools paid coaches out of athletic budgets that were technically not state funds.
If he is not a state employee, is he a part of some university plan for employees that sets up appeals, due process, etc.? I would be stunned if he was.

I'm gonna lean toward he has no case because there are no damages, (meaning he was not damaged by the decision to let him keep his job x number of months longer than he should have). I would walk this opinion back if NJ state law offered a level of protection that I am unaware of.

 

He wouldn't have been there long enough to qualify. He was hired in 2010

 

No, I'm not. The only plausible cause of action would come not from the termination, but from the fact that he had been previously disciplined for what he was eventually terminated for. His legal damages would not arise from losing the job that they could/should have fired him before already. His only damage in being suspended then fired is that he got to keep his job x number of months. Again, not a damage.

The county school system you reference is undoubtedly A. union or B. state employees or probably C. all of the above. Those jobs come with due process protections that I doubt a college basketball coach has.

 

I'd bet the farm he's a state employee. Coaches at public schools are considered state employees. They also get supplements from boosters, but at the core are state employees.

 

Coaches are not part of a tenure system anyway. They are contract employees.

 

That wasn't my question ... I don't think coaches qualify for tenure anyway.
But there are professors with tenure... Which is kind of like a union.
They won't take this sort of precedent well.