Maryland and Rutgers are in their fifth year in the Big Ten, and neither of them exactly looks like a credit to the conference.
Maryland and Rutgers are embarrassing. How much does the Big Ten even care?
The conference’s newest members have been embarrassing in various ways, on top of being weird fits. That’s not necessarily something the Big Ten cares about.
Mitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports
Maryland is in administrative shambles after the death of a player and the scandal that followed it. The Terps are also usually bad at football. Rutgers is a fountain of sadness on the field and has generated off-field headlines ranging from NCAA violations to high-profile player dismissals, including a new one amid an alleged double-murder conspiracy.
A lot of fans and media in the Big Ten’s traditional, Midwestern footprint were never big fans of these two coastal additions in the first place.
This 2016 column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune sums up that view well, comparing Maryland and Rutgers negatively with previous new entrants:
Penn State brought a geographical challenge but also football pizazz to the Big Ten when it arrived in 1993. Nebraska was a fantastic addition in 2011 with its tremendous all-around sports program (men’s basketball being the exception).
Maryland and Rutgers? We don’t care about Maryland, it doesn’t care about us, and nobody cares about Rutgers.
The writer called the two schools “misfits.”
Now that Maryland and Rutgers have humiliated themselves in myriad ways, there’s been renewed sentiment that the Big Ten messed up.
A Sports Illustrated column asks: Should the Big Ten have buyer’s remorse?
There are no take-backs when it comes to conference expansion. Once you add teams to your league, you’re stuck with them until further notice.
That’s the unfortunate reality right now for the Big Ten, which would be justified in feeling a small measure of buyer’s remorse for Maryland and Rutgers, two schools that joined the league during its last round of expansion in 2014 and have spent much of this season making the wrong kind of headlines.
All of that’s definitely true. It’s also true, as that story notes, that the Big Ten has had tons of other scandals that fly in the face of its attempt to position itself as college sports’ moral guardian. Arguably, Maryland’s and Rutgers’ scandals have only made them stronger fits.
But, of course, the Big Ten and its other 12 schools did this for money.
The thrust of the Big Ten’s reasoning for adding Maryland and Rutgers was that it wanted a greater presence in the Washington and New York television markets. (Maryland’s squarely in the D.C. market, while Rutgers is on the outskirts of the New York market.)
The conference wanted more cable providers in those areas to carry the Big Ten Network and make people pay for it. It wanted its game broadcast package to be more attractive to ESPN and Fox, its longtime television partners. Assessing exactly how much Maryland and Rutgers contributed is impossible, but it sure seems like they helped.
In 2013, the Big Ten’s per-team revenue distributions were $26 million.
In 2017, the conference struck up a new six-year football TV contract with ESPN and Fox that pays the conference $2.64 billion, or $31.4 million per school per year just for that.
In 2018, a school’s full share of Big Ten revenue was $52 million, an all-time, all-conference record. Maryland and Rutgers don’t get full shares until the 2020-21 athletic year.
It could be that more people moving away from cable dries up some TV money later on. That might make being in these markets less valuable, and the Big Ten winds up with a diluted product. The downstream effect is hard to predict, however.
The embarrassment these schools have caused the Big Ten is significant, but the league office can take the hit.
Was that TV money worth it? The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel recently argued not:
I sure hope those millions of extra cable television households the Big Ten picked up a few years back were worth it. Because at this point, the collective embarrassment brought upon the league by recent additions Maryland and Rutgers would sure seem to outweigh whatever revenue uptick it received from entering the D.C. and New York/New Jersey viewing markets.
It’s a fair point. To many fans in the Big Ten, Maryland and Rutgers aren’t worth it. They might rather their schools not be associated with these two.
But the people who make these decisions for schools and conferences don’t usually prioritize that. Television’s gradual overtaking of college football has mostly benefited administrators and coaches, who have reaped a financial windfall from it. It’s done little for fans, who have gotten weird kickoff times and conference realignment. It’s done little for players, who are still paid the same thing they were before games were on TV: nothing.
No one Big Ten school will take too much heat from anyone who opposes having Maryland and Rutgers in the league. The conference office might, but much like the pro sports commissioners, Big Ten commish Jim Delany is paid well to take that flack.
As an added bonus for the league, Maryland and Rutgers are bad at football. You read that right.
It’s helpful for the likes of Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State to have two easy wins on the schedule most years. The Big Ten wants to make the College Football Playoff, and the historical standard is that teams can’t lose more than once and get there. In this way, adding Maryland and Rutgers was like buying nice bones for the lions at a zoo.
Maryland’s also pretty good in some other sports. The Terps will probably help bring back some NCAA tournament shares for the Big Ten over the years to come.
So, should the Big Ten feel bad it added Maryland and Rutgers? Sure, but ...
... it should also feel bad about its numerous other scandals. But no matter how the Big Ten tries to sell itself to the world, its goal has always been to help conferences make as much money as possible by building value as a collective media property. To a significant extent, everything else is the cost of doing business.
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