ESPN Finally Gets _ONE_ Program To Do The Right Thing

There, more and more every day, is getting down to just one good thing about ESPN (and, even at that, Your Mileage May Certainly Vary)...

In a vain effort to look important and actually think they're doing something, the network allows a small group of reporters to do the actual work that The Worldwide Leader should be doing (especially with it's position in sports) with it's Outside the Lines series.

Well, they finally did a small sliver of good this week.  They got a physically violent and abusive college basketball coach fired from Rutgers today -- and almost certainly has run him out of the sport.

Mike Rice was fired today as a direct result of ESPN's exposition of a pattern of violent physical abuse of his players.  The videos also showed him throwing homophobic slurs at them.

Several practice videos were shown on the network yesterday (starting with their morning SportsCenter, and leading into their daily program) showing a pattern of verbal and physical abuse of the players.  The usual modus operandi is that Rice would always have a basketball at his beck and call (probably through student managers and the like) that he would chuck at players he did not feel were listening.  And then the slurs start...

He was also known to grab players and physically pull them where he felt he needed to put them.

Game footage of arguments was also shown, as well as bench footage which pretty much made clear that he had no business being around kids of any age.

This is an unstable man.  After being fined $50,000 and ordered to "rehabilitation" during a three-game suspension, yesterday's national show forced the university's President to fire him.

One has to wonder if Rutgers needs to look at a full house-cleaning.  This was the same tape that had him still employed during this season.  The "new information" was almost certainly political pressure (probably "fire him or we will, and take you with him" from the legislature of New Jersey or the like), and, at that point, I don't think he should be the only one to go.