Today, we've got some reading to help get you through the last few hours of the work week, including my take on the latest bit of negative media attention directed at Rutgers. 

Here's my story in today's paper about the competition for Rutgers' starting  strong safety spot, with a few notes tacked on. 

SI's preseason top 20 came out this week, without much love for the Big East. West Virginia (14th) and Pitt (19th) are the only Big East teams included. 

Now, something on which I felt obliged to weigh in: 

You'd think that with two wars and a historic presidential election going on, and with plenty other monumentally important things going on in the word (people trying, with varying degrees of success, for instance, to stop genocide, find cures for deadly diseases or come up with alternative energy sources to combat global warming) that the Rutgers football program would be pretty low on a list of potential topics for an editorial in The New York Times. 

But if you thought that, you were wrong. 

My take on the editorial? First, there are two inaccuracies, one relatively minor, one absurd.

The relatively minor one is that tennis, swimming and fencing were downgraded to CLUB status, not INTRAMURAL status. Club status means they compete against other schools, just not in games sanctioned by the NCAA; intramural means they compete against other Rutgers students, in games that could generously be considered casual. (When I was a student at Fairfield University I played  on intramural volleyball and slow-pitch softball teams and was a two-time champion in intramural sports trivia; not exactly the kind of competitions taking place in the Olympics.)

The really irresponsible mistake was writing that "another secret agreement would allow the coach to walk way from his job without paying the $500,000 penalty stipulated in his contract without paying the $500,000 penalty stipulated in his contract if the stadium expansion is not completed on time." 

If that addendum exists, Bob Mulcahy has taken lying to the public to a level that almost approaches "there are weapons of mass destruction," "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" or "I am not a crook." 

Not only has Mulcahy said on the record for the past three weeks that such an addendum does not exist, he wrote an editorial that appeared in multiple newspapers earlier this week specifically saying, in his most lengthy and formal response to the hubbub surrounding his department, that the aforementioned addendum was never finalized and was not added to Schiano's contract. 

Here's what he wrote in his op-ed piece. 

A purported amendment to the coach's so-called "buyout clause" – an amendment that would allow him to leave Rutgers without financial penalty if the stadium expansion is not completed on time – was never finalized as part of the coach's contract. After numerous discussions and offers, the coach believed that the university was working with him and was committed to the completion of the stadium. A drafted document was never executed, and there is no such agreement amending the coach's contract.

If the folks at The Times were unaware of Mulcahy's denial of the existence of that document, that's incredible. If they're aware of it and are essentially calling Mulcahy a liar, that's even more incredible. 

I've always thought the biggest and, despite all its critics, most widely respected, paper in the world would be more responsible than that. 

But let's put the inaccuracies aside. It irked me to see the editorial not as someone who closely follows Rutgers football and thinks most of this stuff is being blown drastically out of proportion, but as someone who reads The Times every day and wants to read about things that actually matter. 

It isn't that there's a shortage of stuff in the paper or on that page about real issues. It's that instead of wasting valuable space in a paper that so many people read chiding the Rutgers athletic department, they could have -- and should have -- touched on anything from the long list of serious and intriguing issues about which their readers deeply care.