Should Rutgers football coach Kyle Flood be fired?

Things are not looking good for Rutgers football coach Kyle flood.

He was already accused of improperly emailing a professor about defensive back Nadir Barnwell's grades. He'd reportedly insisted he'd coach Saturday's opener despite the cloud over him.

Now five of his current players are among the 10 people accused in a series of crimes victimizing Rutgers students — an unprovoked attack that left a student with a broken jaw, and a series of home invasions in which drugs and money were stolen. Nadir Barnwell, 20, is among those accused in the assault.

As the scandals built Thursday, so did calls for Flood to step down in social and traditional media.

NJ Advance Media's Steve Polti wrote Rutgers must ensure that "defiant answer" about coaching Saturday becomes Flood's "Al Haig moment:"

Flood has to go, and Rutgers shouldn't wait until he leads his team — the part of it that isn't behind bars — onto the field before the Scarlet Knights play Norfolk State. Anything else is delaying the inevitable, and sending a terrible message to the entire university.

 

Polti notes it's not the first time a football player in a major program has been arrested. But he said Flood's gone to pains to protect Barnwell and another player implicated in the charges — Ruhann Peele, who'd faced assault charges in December, though those were later dismissed.

"And to think," Polti wrote, "everyone thought the fallout from that foolish email was Flood's biggest headache."

In an editorial written before the charges, MyCentralJersey.com was already saying Rutgers should come down hard on Flood over the alleged contact with the professor. Citing allegations Flood deliberately circumvented warnings from staff not to contact the professor, the news site writes:

This was a coach who didn’t want to lose arguably the best player in what was an historically bad secondary for Rutgers a year ago, and wasn’t going to let a lowly professor take Barnwell away. He was going to use his rarefied status as the highly paid leader of King Football to make sure that no meager academic policy was going to get in the way of wins and losses.

Social media wasn't much kinder:

What do you think? Is it time for Flood to go? Tell us in the comments below and take our poll: