Rutgers football fans hope athletic director Tim Pernetti is making like Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption” and, with his little rock hammer, secretly tunneling out of the Big East Conference.

Pernetti is saying all the right things: that Rutgers is committed to helping the Big East through this period of turmoil, when schools are leaving and lesser football programs are being courted to fill the gaps. He isn’t saying Rutgers is committed to staying, however.

After all, Dufresne smiled at the warden and laundered prison payoffs and bribes — all the while cleverly plotting his escape.

Rutgers must decide: Bolt for a more competitive conference, or stay and substantially reduce the money it is plowing into the football program. We know what it wants to do: Get out.

If RU doesn’t, it’s going to look silly.

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For the past decade, while Rutgers has been shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into the football program, critics of the Monopoly money infusion were told to pipe down.

Rutgers was building for the future, supporters insisted. Coach Greg Schiano said so — along with former athletic director Bob Mulcahy, who was pumping so much money into the football program that he couldn’t keep track of it all, and that’s why he was fired.

RU was on the cusp of big-time college football. Single-handedly, the Scarlet Knights would restore state pride, we were told. That’s why the stadium expansion was needed. And the Hale Center. That’s why Rutgers didn’t need just any practice bubble; it needed the nation’s largest air-supported indoor structure.

And that’s why RU has clung to its coach for $2 million per year.

But now, with defections, the Swiss Cheese Conference is wooing Navy and Air Force, Villanova and Central Florida — and Temple, which once was evicted from the league because it was so lousy.

This is what all that money has bought: conference mediocrity?

Remember, too, that the RU athletic department has been siphoning more in subsidies from the rest of the university than any other athletic department in the nation — $115 million from 2005 to 2010.

Unless it turns the Hale Center into a science library, Rutgers must escape to a better conference — because the Big East could lose its automatic BCS bid. And this isn’t what New Jersey paid for.