They first saw the video Nov. 26, the Monday after Thanksgiving, inside an office in Piscataway, N.J., but it was hardly the first time that senior Rutgers officials had heard of the troubling behavior of Mike Rice, the men's basketball coach.
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Rutgers fired Mike Rice, the men's basketball coach, on Wednesday. The firing came after video surfaced of him throwing basketballs at players and taunting them with vulgar language.
There was the upperclassman who earlier in the year had come forward to say that he felt bullied. There was an outburst during a game that led to Mr. Rice's ejection. And there were the months of allegations from a former assistant, who repeatedly claimed that Mr. Rice was abusive.
Tim Pernetti, the athletic director, knew all of that and had repeatedly tried to rein in Mr. Rice, according to a 50-page report that Rutgers commissioned outside lawyers to prepare. He personally reprimanded him, attended Mr. Rice's practices and even assigned the university's sports psychologist to work with the team, the report said.
But the video was stark, a highlight reel of abuse — the coach kicking his players, hurling basketballs at them and taunting them with homophobic slurs. Those epithets were especially galling at Rutgers, where a gay freshman had killed himself.
The video, parts of which were made public last week, was 30 minutes long. It had been professionally edited from a collection of 219 DVDs covering hundreds of hours of practices, material that Rutgers had voluntarily provided to Eric Murdock, the former assistant, after his departure.
Mr. Pernetti's decision not to fire Mr. Rice after seeing the video — despite internal university documents that suggest he legally could have — cost him his job, and has embroiled Rutgers in a deepening scandal during a time of tumultuous change for the university.
But Mr. Pernetti is hardly the only person who watched the edited video and still approved of keeping Mr. Rice on staff until last week. The athletic department's human resources and chief financial officer saw the video, as did the university's outside legal counsel. At least one member of the board of governors saw it. Robert L. Barchi, the university president, has said he did not see it before last week, although at least one of his senior directors asked him to watch it.
Interviews with university officials, former players and members of the board, as well as reviews of internal documents and legal records, show that when the most senior Rutgers officials were confronted with explicit details about Mr. Rice's behavior toward his players and his staff, they ignored them or issued relatively light penalties.
The interviews and documents reveal a culture in which the university was far more concerned with protecting itself from legal action than with protecting its students from an abusive coach.
University officials focused on the technical issue of whether Mr. Rice had created a hostile work environment, a potential legal justification for his firing, while paying less attention to the larger question of whether Rutgers should employ an authority figure who hurled slurs at and physically provoked its students.
Mr. Murdock first laid out his allegations about Mr. Rice in a letter that his lawyer sent to university officials in July. He said officials repeatedly canceled meetings with him to discuss those claims, until Nov. 26, when he showed them the video.
About two weeks later, Rutgers suspended Mr. Rice for three games and fined him $50,000. Mr. Pernetti did not offer much explanation at the time other than to say that the punishment was related to incidents at practice involving players.
"We commenced a thorough, lengthy and fair investigation, and this was the result," he said in December.
Meanwhile, the university had hired outside counsel to investigate the men's basketball program and determine Rutgers's legal options. Lawyers with the firm Connell Foley of Roseland, N.J., interviewed coaches, players and administrators. They reviewed text messages, secret recordings and dozens of hours of video, noting the vulgar terms Mr. Rice used to address players.
Nate Schweber and Marc Santora contributed reporting.
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