The Rutgers women’s basketball team met with Imus and they accepted his apology.

Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer said Friday the team had accepted radio host Don Imus’ apology. She said he deserves a chance to move on but hopes the furor his racist and sexist insult caused will be a catalyst for change.

“We, the Rutgers University Scarlet Knight basketball team, accept — accept — Mr. Imus’ apology, and we are in the process of forgiving,” Stringer read from a team statement a day after the women met personally with Imus and his wife.

“We still find his statements to be unacceptable, and this is an experience that we will never forget,” she said.

…The team members respected Imus’ willingness to apologize, but they also wanted him to understand how they were hurt, said the Rev. DeForest Soaries, Stringer’s pastor, who joined the meeting. Imus tried to explain what he meant, “but there was really no explanation that they could understand,” Soaries said on NBC’s “Today” show.

What I really cannot understand is the kind of lowlife that would send hate email to the basketball team, who are the real victims here. Deidre Imus, the I-Man’s wife, told listeners to cut it out.

Deirdre Imus also said that the Rutgers players have been receiving hate e-mail, and she demanded that it stop. She told listeners “if you must send e-mail, send it to my husband,” not the team.

“I have to say that these women are unbelievably courageous and beautiful women,” she said.

Lookee here — the paragon of virtue and morality, Tom DeLay, is calling for Rosie’s head as retribution in his Townhall essay, If the Left Takes Imus, We’ll Take Rosie.

So if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s why I am calling on conservatives to use the available media (radio talk shows, blogs, letters to the editor) to protest and demand that Rosie O’Donnell be kicked off The View. Where are the demonstrations in front of ABC? Where are the boycott threats for The View’s advertisers, or its parent company, Disney? Who is holding Barbara Walters accountable for Rosie’s offenses? We can fight like the Left, too. If Don Imus falls to the pleas of political correctness, we’re taking Rosie O’Donnell down with him.

Even the Freepers laughed at this one.***

On a semi-related note, Jon Corzine, the N.J. governor, was going to attend that meeting between Rutgers and Imus, but he was severely injured in a car crash.

A state trooper was driving Corzine to a meeting between Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team Thursday night when another vehicle, swerving to avoid a pickup truck, hit the governor’s SUV and sent it into the guard rail on the Garden State Parkway.

When Corzine arrived at the hospital, doctors said he was conscious but had several injuries: a femur bone broken in two places that had lacerated his skin, a broken sternum, six broken ribs on each side, a head laceration and a minor fracture on a lower vertebrae.

A big get well soon to Corzine.