Rutgers’s Move to Big Ten Is a Win-Win Everywhere but the Field
On College Football
By MARC TRACY OCT. 11, 2016
Fourth-ranked Michigan amassed 309 yards and scored six touchdowns Saturday in Piscataway, N.J., while holding Rutgers to 6 total yards — the result of one pass completion — on the way to a score of 43-0.
Then it was halftime.
Eventual score: 78-0. In defense of the Scarlet Knights, they did get two first downs in the second half.
The rout dropped Rutgers to 4-15 in conference games since it began play in the Big Ten in 2014. A Twitter account devoted to Michigan football history noted Sunday that soon after the Wolverines sent the University of Chicago to a similar loss — 85-0 in the 1939 season — the Maroons dropped their football program altogether. (The Maroons now compete in Division III.)
And so the annual ritual is upon us: wondering why Rutgers (2-4, 0-3 Big Ten) even bothers competing in football, much less in the Big Ten, in which it is a historic and geographic and, apparently, football outlier, hopelessly outmatched in the conference’s signature sport.
Last year the news developments that prompted this rite of fall were even uglier: Six players were dismissed from the football team after they were accused of criminal conduct, and Kyle Flood, then the head coach, was suspended for three games by the university after it was revealed that he contacted a dance teacher to try to secure extra-credit work for a player who needed a sufficient grade to stay eligible.
Those incidents were embarrassing for the conference, just as Saturday’s 78-0 defeat was in an entirely different way. Still, the reasons Rutgers were invited to join the Big Ten — a league that used to be synonymous with the Midwest — are as operative now as ever: It is financially a win-win for both the conference and the Scarlet Knights.
From Rutgers’s perspective, as long as it is determined to feature big-time athletics — a decision that was made a few decades ago, even if it still causes some consternation in New Brunswick — it is better off in the Big Ten, where it receives about $10 million in conference revenue annually and in a few years will vest to a figure north of $40 million each year.
By contrast, had the university stayed in the American Athletic Conference, which had been the stopping point for members of the former Big East with major football teams, it would claim just a few million dollars a year in conference revenue. That is precisely why the majority of current A.A.C. members have spent the past few months scrambling for entry into the Big 12.
But a Big Ten that includes Rutgers is a winner, too. For one thing, fans of, say, Michigan protest too much when they wring hands over blighted traditions and diluted product. Michigan still plays Ohio State in the last game of the regular season every year. And the fact that Purdue has been in the conference since 1896 does not change its 6-28 Big Ten record going back to 2012.
And then there is the money.
The Big Ten’s presence in New Jersey and Maryland — the two states whose flagship universities most recently joined the conference — is often painted purely as a math solution to a math problem: planting flags on the East Coast, including in and near the Washington and New York metropolitan areas, equals more households with more cable cords, and that justifies higher broadcast deals with major stations and more subscriber fees to the Big Ten Network, which is partly owned by the league.
That is all true. In Rutgers’s first year in the conference, the Big Ten Network added eight million homes in the New York City area and experienced a higher-than-expected rise in advertising revenue, according to the network’s president, Mark Silverman. Without Rutgers and Maryland, it is not at all clear that the Big Ten could have secured reported rights deals with ESPN, Fox Sports and CBS Sports worth $250 million annually.
But Rutgers brought other assets, harder to appraise but still valuable. Adding Maryland and Rutgers enabled the conference to credibly schedule its men’s basketball tournaments at Washington’s Verizon Center (this season) and Madison Square Garden (in 2018).
It prevented the Atlantic Coast Conference from adding Rutgers, thereby keeping New Jersey’s rich recruiting soil, long dominated by Big Ten stalwarts like Penn State and Michigan, in the tent. (Last year’s No. 1 overall prospect, the Paramus Catholic defensive lineman Rashan Gary, might have picked Michigan without the promise of playing Rutgers once a year, but it could not have hurt.)
And it may not have been coincidental that Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh chose the aftermath of the Rutgers game to explicitly start a Heisman Trophy campaign for his all-purpose star Jabrill Peppers. (Harbaugh used his postgame comments to compare Peppers to none other than Jim Thorpe, saying, “It just came to me.”) It was the old Notre Dame trick, knowing that the East Coast media establishment would be listening.
And it’s not as if Rutgers doesn’t have a football past, or that it can’t have a future. The Scarlet Knights had a decent run in football in the 2000s, peaking with an 11-2 campaign in 2006. They plan to invest in their program, and their first-year head coach, Chris Ash, has experience as an assistant at prominent Big Ten programs like Wisconsin and Ohio State.
But that is, admittedly, secondary. What matters is this: If you believe 78-0 makes Rutgers unworthy of the Big Ten, you are looking at the wrong scoreboard.
