Rutgers....Really?

                                                        

Once again my faith in college football is shattered. Last week the Big Ten which is actually the Big Twelve announced that it is now the Big Fourteen with addition of the University of Maryland and Rutgers University. Rutgers…really?

Rutgers is also known as the State University of New Jersey and is the largest public institution of higher learning in the state with three campuses.  The largest is in New Brunswick.  It is a blue blood university founded in 1766 by the Dutch Reformed Church and named Queens College.  It was closed for a period of time because of financial difficulties, but re-emerged as Rutgers College in 1825 named after an American Revolutionary War hero.  Like Ohio State, Rutgers became a land grant college in 1864 with a strong emphasis on agriculture.

The major football conferences have been on a re-alignment binge. The big loser is the Big East which, in addition to Rutgers, has been gutted with the loss of schools like Miami, Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and West Virginia. Of course, it now has Boise State which is what…east of California which is also home of new Big East Conference member San Diego State which is east of the Pacific Ocean. The University of Maryland was a charter member of the ACC and is about to pony up $50 million to leave the ACC to join the Big Ten. Its students are shocked asking the big question….

Why???? At the root of all the conference moves is money. Maryland in particular seems focused on increased revenues from lucrative television contracts. Rutgers, in addition to money, is looking for the cache of the Big Ten to compliment its new and improved football program in the making these past ten years.

More curious is the Big Ten which apparently sees a media market of 14 million people in the DC and New Jersey areas. This casts a large Big Ten shadow which stretched its Midwest boundaries east when Penn State joined the conference and west with Nebraska last year. But at least those schools made sense.

If the Big Ten thinks for a minute those on the east coast are going to be sitting on the edge of their chairs anxiously awaiting Big Ten football…it will be sorely disappointed. Start with the basic mindset of those who live in the DC and New Jersey/New York media markets. They don’t think much of Midwesterners. We are viewed as a bunch of rubes. We live in fly over country. There are no ties. There are no traditions. There are no common values.

Jump to Indiana. Do you really think the Hoosiers…right wing conservatives…are going to identify with eastern liberal snobs? Maryland? It is such a tiny state. And Rutgers? How do you spell it? State school not withstanding, it's NEW JERSEY! Who is going to watch? That ultimately is the determinant of what these media contracts are worth.

Boundaries have disappeared in the modern digital age. The world has shrunk. But within our United States there are still regional loyalties and sensibilities. Midwesterners who could identify with Penn State and Nebraska will not identify with Eastern schools with which there are NO ties and NO common identification. Just because you put a football game on television doesn’t mean anyone is going to watch. Rutgers and Maryland will always be the add on schools…the poor relations.

I give the union between the Big Ten and these two eastern schools about ten years, if that, before Maryland and Rutgers search for ways to rejoin their traditional conferences. Better fits for the Big Ten would have been Missouri, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, or Notre Dame. But those schools got away.

But what would you expect from a conference that named its two divisions Leaders and Legends. Nobody said they were smart!!! Go Bucks.