Rutgers is still the big winner in conference realignment — but can it actually win?
Published Aug. 05, 2023, 7:15 a. m.
By Steve Politi | NJ Advance Media for NJ. com So now the Big Ten is opening its diamond-encrusted gates to Oregon and Washington, becoming the first true national conference and ensuring that a generation of college football fans will best demonstrate their loyalty with frequent flier miles. But, hey, why stop there? Cal and Stanford are awaiting their lifeboats from the sinking — or, at this point, already sunk — Pac 12, and likely would come crawling at a huge discount.
Maybe, given that these are two of the nation’s finest academic institutions, the university presidents will win out over the TV executives and bring them aboard. Hey, crazier things have happened in college sports, right? (Okay. Not recently.
) Or, maybe the Big Ten decides to play the long game and waits for North Carolina and Virginia to get tired of their measly payments from the ACC. Or, who knows, maybe the league finally will convince Notre Dame that it can’t be left out of the superconference shuffle and land the biggest prize out there. The great wheel of realignment never stops spinning.
Bigger, to be clear, isn’t better. But bigger is where this process is headed. Rivals once fought over trophies shaped like buckets, but now the only things that matter are buckets of money.
College football is already unrecognizable from what it was just 10 years ago. Everyone is worried about what’s best for their school in the short term. No one cares what’s best for the sport, period, and that’s sad.
The good news in New Jersey? Rutgers remains the undisputed National Champions of Realignment. No university, before or since, improved its conference affiliation in a more dramatic way than Rutgers did when it accepted the Big Ten’s invitation in Nov. 2012.
To truly end up in a better position by switching conferences, a school must achieve two objectives: 1. Improve its financial situation so dramatically that it is a game changer. 2.
Avoid losing the special rivalries that make college sports, well, special. Rutgers accomplished No. 1 when it left the American Athletic Conference, even if the athletic department is perpetually stuck in the red.
The Scarlet Knights also had ditched traditional rivals like Princeton and Lehigh years earlier when it went bigtime. Maryland and Penn State, even if neither embraced their side of the whole rivalry thing, were massive upgrades from the likes of South Florida and Louisville. And don’t forget: The Big Ten impacted Rutgers in positive ways beyond athletics that nobody talks about.
It was a win-win-win decision. But here’s the big question as Rutgers barrels head first into the superconference era: Can it, you know, actually win? Each time the Big Ten expands, it gets better. Maybe Oregon isn’t the national powerhouse it was a few years ago in football, but it still has Phil Knight’s Nike money and a national reputation.
Washington is somewhat down, too, but beat the Scarlet Knights twice recently, in 2016-17, by a combined score of 78-27. Much like the last two powerhouses the Big Ten grabbed, USC and UCLA, the Ducks and Huskies are good in just about everything. As for Rutgers? It largely was overlooked this spring, but the Scarlet Knights finished 130th in the Learfield Directors’ Cup standings, the best available measure of an athletic department’s overall success.
That is nearly 60 slots from the second-worst Big Ten rival (Purdue, at 72) and behind the likes of Fairleigh Dickinson (98) and LIU Brooklyn (119). That, to put it mildly, is not good enough. Rutgers now has the resources that other colleges are tripping over themselves to get.
Oregon and Washington were willing to take less than a full share of the Big Ten revenue pie — although, it should be noted, a piece that is still expected to be bigger than the one Rutgers was forced to take — to join the conference. The Scarlet Knights have to improve across the board in a hurry because the competition is. UCLA is on the football schedule in 2024, then UCLA and USC are the following year.
When Rutgers guard Paul Mulcahy wanted a better name, image and likeness deal for his final season of college basketball, he found one at Washington. The deep end of the pool keeps getting deeper for the Scarlet Knights. Take the Olympic sports out of the equation for a moment, because even as Rutgers sprinters suddenly have Tracktown, USA (aka Eugene, Oregon) on their travel itinerary, few will notice if they can’t compete.
In football and men’s basketball? Everyone will. Greg Schiano, despite much-celebrated progress off the football field, is 6-21 in the Big Ten since returning to Piscataway. Steve Pikiell is the architect of a remarkable hoops renaissance that has done more than just hold its own in its conference, and still, the Scarlet Knights were an NIT team last winter.
It doesn’t seem possible that the Big Ten could get more difficult but, well, here were are. Even if Rutgers improves, it is chasing a bar that keeps climbing higher. This time, it’s Oregon and Washington.
Next time, maybe it’ll be Stanford, or North Carolina, or some other unexpected powerhouse desperate for the big bucks. The only certainty? The Big Ten is only going to get bigger — and that means, for Rutgers, even tougher. The Scarlet Knights need to get better.
Like, soon. .