A dark shadow has been cast on Pernetti's administration at Rutgers. (Wikimedia Commons)

Did you know who Tim Pernetti was? Did you know that he is responsible for bringing the long-troubled Rutgers athletic department back to respectability by reconstructing the football stadium and the program after Greg Schiano's departure, successfully rebranding the entire department, and facilitating the university's exciting transition to the Big Ten conference?

Sadly, most of you do know who Tim Pernetti is now, and for all the wrong reasons. 

After new footage of Rutgers men's basketball head coach Mike Rice verbally and physically assaulting and berating his players during an open practice was unearthed by ESPN and Outside the Lines, a media firestorm was unleashed on the coach, and deservedly so. Rice deserved to be fired and he was, but not just because he publicly displayed a poor and destructive example of leadership; Rice was a loser.

He was hired from Robert Morris University with an impressive resume (73-31 and two tournament appearances in three seasons), but Rice's success did not transfer over well to Piscataway. Hired to reshape the basketball program and elevate the team to a level of respectability akin to Schiano's football team, Rice coached three sub-.500 seasons at Rutgers, missing the tournament each year and showing zero improvement compared to previous regimes. Rice got fired because he was a bad coach, he coached badly, and he didn't win. Good riddance.

Unfortunately, the sackings haven't ceased in Piscataway and, as a proud Jersey native, I'm scared for the future of my state's university. 

I'm not dumb; my fellow students and I study at the one of the top journalism schools in the nation. We are taught the ins-and-outs of news: how stories are uncovered and covered, produced and manufactured. We are told to look critically at the world around us and who dictates what we see and believe.

ESPN has controlled this story from the get-go. Though the original incident broke in late 2012 when Rice was suspended for three games due to inappropriate conduct in practice, there was no video evidence, just written word and confession. The staffers at Outside the Lines apparently decided to dig deeper, as any good team of journalists should do, and was gifted extended video of Rice's transgressions. Nearly three months after the original story broke, Bob Ley and his team ran with the video evidence this week on the OTL program, and the response was overwhelming.

The Worldwide Leader of Sports had won; they had been first to a damning story about a university athletic official conducting himself poorly. And the dominoes fell. 

Like the over exaggerated support for Kevin Ware when he broke his leg (he's not dead!) over the weekend, Twitter caught onto the Rice story fast, making it trend nationwide, and, most importantly, trend in New York City. Now it was a story - apparently the barometer for a news-worthy story nowadays is the Twittersphere reaction: hashtags, memes, and snark galore. 

Over the past couple days, I couldn't escape the Rice story and the fallout. It was on CNN, the Daily Show and TMZ, receiving universal condemnation. Interestingly enough, more attention was paid to this so-called "scandal" and Rutgers basketball in one week than has been paid to Rutgers basketball in a decade. (Any press is good press, am I right?) And once Rice was fired Wednesday, the story should have stalled there. But ESPN knows better than anyone that a sports story doesn't die until the Worldwide Leader says so.

So now, ESPN has manipulated Rice's firing due to personal conduct issues into a university-wide transgression akin to the Penn State-Sandusky scandal, via the excessive coverage the organization has been subjecting its impressionable viewers to. When did a coach child diddling in the showers of the athletic facility and the entire university covering it up to protect its self-inflated image even remotely compare to the actions of Rice, Pernetti, and Rutgers president Robert Barchi? 

Let's get one fact straight: Pernetti is in the right. He said he wanted to fire Rice in December when he learned of the footage of the actions in practice. In a statement read by Barchi during a news conference reporting Pernetti's "resignation", the ex-director of athletics said, "My first instincts when I saw the videotape of Coach Rice's behavior was to fire him immediately. However, Rutgers decided to follow a process involving university lawyers, human resources professionals, and outside counsel. Following review of the independent investigative report, the consensus was that university policy would not justify dismissal. I have admitted my role in, and regret for, that decision, and wish that I had the opportunity to go back and override it for the sake of everyone involved."

Pernetti didn't decide not to fire Rice; essentially, the outside investigators did. Say what you will about their report, which is subjective to say the least, but their findings do not reflect the feelings or opinions of Pernetti, a honest man, who, with enough responsibility given to him by his superiors, would have done the right thing and terminated Rice's association with the university immediately. 

But now he's unemployed. The promising young AD, who in just three years had negotiated an ascension of Rutgers athletics to the top conference in the country, putting the school on a national scale in all sports, will not be able to follow his university there. He paved a path on which he may never pass. 

If Pernetti is at fault for not firing Rice, then so is Barchi, just by association and administrative responsibility. Neither deserve to be relieved of their duties, but one has and one will. Undeservedly so, the power structure at the great and rising Rutgers University may crumble due to the actions of one misguided and ineffective coach and one ratings-hungry and selfish media organization, halting all momentum in the athletic department and staining the reputation of Pernetti, the university and my state for the foreseeable future.

This is not Penn State. Rice is not Jerry Sandusky. Pernetti is not Tim Curley. Barchi is not Graham Spanier. Rutgers men's basketball is not Penn State football. But when the ratings are high and the world is watching, what's a few hairs split?

Reach Associate Sports Editor Jeremy Bergman via e-mail or on Twitter @JABergman.