Screw It: S-E-C

for over 100 years.  

That's a historical footnote.  Should we say "no history of succes"?  How about "no games worth replaying on BTN"?

If you want to say Rutgers has a halfway decent football program in 2012 and justify it that way, OK.  If you want to say that NYC's imaginary Rutgers fans will cause this move to "deliver the NYC market," I disagree, but OK.  Let's just not be ridiculous and defend Rutgers as some great football tradition.

Just for fun, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutgers_Scarlet_Knights_football .  Four paragraph summary of Rutgers football history.  Two on the first season, two on "The Remaining Years (1870-2011)."  You can't make this stuff up.

Note that the game you refer to was actually a soccer match, not a rugby match. 

"Football" did not come to mean the Rugby rules (rather than Association rules) until Harvard and McGill started playing each other in the mid 1870s.  Rutgers and Princeton have inexplicably managed to cast that soccer match in 1869 as the first-ever college football game, but it most certainly was not.  Neither Rutgers nor Princeton had anything to do with the "invention" of college football.

Should we invite them to join the conference because of their football history?

I agree.  You can add Minnesota to the list as well, since their brand new stadium only holds about 54k, I believe. 

When they start selling out their stadiums after joining the Big Ten, which is a solid possibility, they'll expand like so many other schools have done.  The Big House didn't start at 109k, remember. 

The BTN works financially because if you go to a sports bar in Southern California on a Saturday you'll see fans from Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin clustered together watching their game.  If you go next door you'll see OSU, Nebraska, PSU, etc. fans.  Each school with a sizeable group every week.  You don't see the same thing with schools like Rutgers or Maryland. 

I'm not saying they are more valuable, just that their inclusion creates a critical mass for getting BTN on basic cable and not a sports tier in the DC/NJ/NYC area.

News Corp. is purchasing a 49% stake in the YES Network.

News Corp. also has a 49% stake in the BTN.

YES reaches 12 million homes in the NYC metro area with a subscriber fee of $3 a month for revenue last year of $405 million (excluding advertising). FOX and their partners can now turn around and demand that the BTN be placed on basic cable in NYC or else you don't get the YES Network. This also creates added content for the BTN and the advertising fees that go with it. Selling advertising for an Illinois vs Maryland game will get you more money than a Big Ten soccer game.

Rutgers and Maryland are two more mouths to feed, but do you really think that the conference is going to add two new members on a whim? They must be pretty sure that the addition of these two schools will result in a fair amount of extra revenue. Besides, they willalmost certainly have to buy into the BTN the same way NU is currently doing, and thus won't get a full share until year 6 of their membership.

I'm not happy about the addition to these two to the conference, but I see the reason behind it from a revenue stand point if all goes to plan.