Robert L. Carothers is completing an 18-year term as president at the University of Rhode Island. Carothers has been involved in the athletic program as much as any university president in recent years.

Today’s story is the second of six on Carothers’ impact on the URI athletic program.

Rhode Island running back Jimmy Hughes struggles to find yardage during the Rams' 49-0 defeat at the hands of UMass last season.

Journal photo / John Freidah

SOUTH KINGSTOWN – When he moved into the president’s office at the University of Rhode Island in 1991, Robert L. Carothers inherited a football program that had suffered through five consecutive losing seasons.

When he finishes moving out of the president’s office on June 30, he will leave his successor, David Dooley, a football program that has suffered through seven consecutive losing seasons.

Winning football is not part of Carothers’ legacy at URI. The Rams played 200 games during his 18-year tenure, won 66 and lost 134, a winning percentage of .330. Only three teams enjoyed a winning season: 1991 under Bob Griffin (6-5), 1995 under Floyd Keith (7-4), and 2001 under Tim Stowers (8-3).

Ironically, it was an incident involving the football team that thrust the University of Rhode Island into national prominence in 1996 and prompted Carothers to intensify his campaign to erase URI’s image as a party school.

Rhode Island does not have a tradition of winning football. The Rams can boast only 30 winning seasons of the 109 autumns they have played the game. Non-winning steaks of 13 years (1913 through 1926), eight years (1942 through 1951 with no teams during the 1942 and 1943 war years) and nine years (1958 through 1966) preceded the current seven-year streak of futility.

Just as each of the four coaches who worked for him thought he could revive the glory days of 1981 to 1985, so did Carothers believe he could turn around URI football.

“I grew up in a football culture. I like to win football games,” he said during an interview in his office in May. Raised in the coal mine-steel mill-football country of western Pennsylvania, he earned his degrees – bachelor’s, doctorate and law – at universities in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Football country. He came here after five years as chancellor of the Minnesota State University system. Big Ten football country.

And he came here with high expectations that remain unmet.

The 1991 team won its last game and finished 6-5, but the 1992 team staggered to a 1-10 finish, the finale a 38-0 loss at Connecticut. Carothers fired Griffin, the well-respected Rams coach since 1976 who had won 79 games, more than any of URI’s previous 14 head coaches, and who had taken URI into national prominence with 10-3 seasons and NCAA playoff appearances in 1984 and 1985.

After two years, Carothers concluded that Griffin had passed his prime. Now, having seen three coaches post two winning seasons in 16 years, he is not so sure.

“I think in retrospect maybe the decision with Bob was not fully informed. I was used to teams winning. It just seemed to me that he had gone past his peak and that we needed new energy in the program. Now, after I saw the performance of the other folks that we brought in here, maybe he was doing about as good as he could do, or anybody could do. I feel kind of bad about that in retrospect.

“But also, you know, just doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is the classic definition of insanity. It seemed to me we should just try to shake that up,” he added.

Keith was next. The former assistant coach at Colorado and Indiana was URI’s first black head coach in football. He preached “A Planned Positive Attitude” and in 1995 produced a 7-4 team. But star receiver Bobby Apgar’s career-ending injuries in a fatal car wreck in New York City hours after URI’s stunning upset of UConn on Oct. 29, 1995, foreshadowed a dark future for URI football.

Almost a year later, Oct. 7, 1996, members of the football team conducted a Monday afternoon raid against Theta Delta Chi fraternity in retaliation for the treatment of a couple of freshman non-roster players. In response, Carothers dealt a punishing blow of his own. Two players were expelled and 30 suspended for one game -- four were subsequently charged criminally. And he forfeited the game against Connecticut the next Saturday.

“I think the team was not very disciplined before that, and the fact the team wasn’t very disciplined played a part in what happened,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that the coach and the assistant coaches could not have sniffed that out, because it didn’t happen instantaneously. There was a planning period that went on before they went in there and enough time that they decided who was the striker force and who were the reinforcements. It was so outrageous.”

Carothers said his decision was the first time an NCAA institution forfeited an event for disciplinary reasons. The Los Angeles Times published a front-page story, and national publicity ensued.

“It just seemed to me we had to make a statement on fraternities, we had to make a statement on alcohol, and we had to make a statement on violence. In many ways this was a wonderful opportunity to do that,” he said.

Forfeiting cost URI $200,000 in compensation to UConn for lost revenue.

“Looking back on it, I still think it was the right thing to do,” he said.

Keith won only seven more games at URI and announced his resignation on Nov. 8, 1999, effective at the end of that season. He said the program never recovered from the fallout of the fraternity incident.

Stowers, the former Auburn lineman who had coached Georgia Southern to a national championship in 1990, fielded a punishing running attack most of his eight years in Kingston and turned in an 8-3 season in 2001, mostly with players Keith had recruited. But Stowers’ Rams didn’t pass, didn’t play defense and didn’t win more than four games in any of his other seven seasons. He was fired after the 2007 season with a year remaining on his contract.

Carothers was convinced that young Darren Rizzi, an All-America tight end for the Rams under Griffin, had the stuff to revive URI football.

“I really did think that Darren would take us in that direction. He had the energy, the enthusiasm. He had the connections in New Jersey and New York. He had the hometown-boy stuff going for him. There were a lot of good things coming out of that,” he said.

Rizzi’s wide-open offense created some excitement last fall, but his team was shut out three times, scored only seven points twice and finished 3-9. In March he left for a position with the Miami Dolphins.

As the losses mounted during his 18 years, Carothers resisted every call to drop football and still believes the Rams can win with the right coach and successful recruiting.

“People used to say, ‘Well, you should get rid of football,’ and I would say, ‘When you hear that I’m thinking about getting rid of football, you know I have another job, because nobody survives that,’ ” he said with a laugh. “But I wouldn’t do it anyway, just from personal grounds.”

URI football coaches in the Carothers Era

-BOB GRIFFIN (1991-1992)

Record: 7-15

Winning seasons: 1991 (6-5)

Championships: 0

Playoffs: 0

-FLOYD KEITH (1993-1999)

Record: 23-53

Winning seasons: 1995 (7-4)

Championships: 0

Playoffs: 0

-TIM STOWERS (2000-2007)

Record: 33-57

Winning seasons: 2001 (8-3)

Championships: 0

Playoffs: 0

-DARREN RIZZI (2008)

Record: 3-9

Winning seasons: 0

Playoffs: 0

-TOTALS

Coaches: 4

Record: 66-134

Winning seasons: 3

Championships: 0

Playoffs: 0

mszostak@projo.com