It was a Reign of Error.

Or, more accurately, errors. One, after another, after another, after another.

Losing Al Skinner. Hiring Jim Harrick. Admitting Lamar Odom. Hiring Jerry DeGregorio. Continuing to pour money into a football program that loses games – and increasingly-hard-to-come-by dollars – year after year, while playing in an overgrown high school stadium where the stands are seldom anywhere near full, yet not having a Division I hockey team in a state that has a history of turning out top-flight players.

Is it any wonder I nicknamed URI’s outgoing president, Robert Carothers, “The Nutty Professor?”

Because all of those mistakes easily could have been – frankly, should have been – avoided.

“A great embarrassment,” is what Carothers called Harrick in a story in Sunday’s Journal.

“The single worst personnel decision I ever made in my life,” was how, in that same article, Carothers described his hiring of Jerry D.

The embarrassment is that Carothers hired either one of them.

It was no shock to anyone other than The Nutty Professor that Harrick would bring institutional embarrassment to URI, just as he had to UCLA, and as he would go on to do at Georgia.

Just as it was no surprise to anyone other than The Nutty Professor that DeGregorio was woefully over his head as a big-time college basketball coach.

The writing, in both those cases, was on the wall. As well as in the pages of The Providence Journal.

But the Nutty Professor, in blissful ignorance, and his desperation to win games, ignored the obvious.

He tried to make Harrick’s hiring the stuff of Greek tragedy, when, in reality, it was a Rhode Island farce.

Carothers talked at the time about “proud men who win great victories … only to have the gods cast them down, humble them when, for a moment, their judgment fails them and one wrong move leads inexorably to another.”

As it turned out, The Nutty Professor could have been describing himself –– his faulty judgment resulting in one wrong move leading inexorably to another.

You didn’t have to be the Oracle at Delphi to foretell Harrick’s hiring was a mistake.

That embarrassing error had its roots in the failure of Carothers and the first athletic director he hired, “Revenue Ron” Petro, to sign Al Skinner to a long-term contract that would have kept the man who said he wanted to be “the black Frank Keaney” in Kingston.

Carothers’ next A.D., lest we forget, was Tom McElroy, who came to URI via the Big East and UConn and left amidst highly strained circumstances before his contract was up.

“I wasn’t looking to leave,” Skinner has said. “I wanted to stay. I was really, really disappointed. I didn’t feel I was being respected, or rewarded, for what I did to bring the program national recognition. I think it was because Petro and Carothers came along later. They didn’t know about the tough times, when we were working out of a trailer, practically begging kids to come play in Kingston. It was a difficult sell. But they didn’t know about those times.”

On the subject of athletics, Carothers didn’t know about a lot of things.

After Skinner left URI for Boston College, The Nutty Professor turned URI into a basketball reputation rehabilitation clinic. Harrick needed a job. Odom needed a place to play. Carothers provided both, at the cost of his own – and URI’s – reputation.

He hired Harrick when no other school would. He admitted Odom – after first having him write a three-paragraph essay – when not even UNLV would touch him because of questions surrounding his test scores and high school transcripts.

Harrick did take the Rams to within seconds of the Final Four in 1998, but he did it with Skinner’s players, and then bolted to Georgia after making another NCAA tourney appearance in ’99.

The Rams would not have been invited to the Big Dance that year had Odom not made a last-second shot to beat Temple in the finals of the A-10 tournament. Hoping to retain Odom’s services for a second season, Carothers hired Jerry D. Although Odom never took his studies seriously, he was smart enough to take the money and go to the NBA – a decision that was foreseen by everyone but The Nutty Professor, who was left without Lamar and with DeGregorio.

Basketball wasn’t his only blind spot.

Carothers came to Kingston with visions of football glory. But, after firing Bob Griffin – who’d led the Rams to the I-AA playoffs in 1984 and ’85, Carothers’ three subsequent grid coaches have produced just two winning seasons in the last 16 years. Not surprisingly, fans don’t exactly flock to Meade Stadium on fall Saturdays. While attendance dwindles, expenses mount.

We’ll never know how URI might have fared in hockey had the administration ever decided to have a Division I team. What we do know is that Rhode Island has been a hockey hotbed for as long as anyone can remember, annually producing players who can play at the highest level. We also know that Maine has won a couple of national championships. If the Black Bears could do it, isn’t it possible that the Rams, blessed with a base of homegrown hockey talent, could have done it, too?

Thanks to The Nutty Professor and his passion for football, we’ll never know.

What we do know is that, throughout his involvement in athletics at URI, Carothers has made egregious errors that easily could have been avoided.

jdonalds@projo.com