Conference Realignment: What Would Be Best for Rutgers?

For some reason, reading through comments on my article "Conference Realignment: Frank the Tank and What Syracuse Should Do" http://bleacherreport.com/articles/414160-conference-realignment-frank-the-tank-and-what-cuse-should-do led me to ask myself: What would be best for Rutgers?

That is an absurdly funny question for any college football fan older than 25 or 30. For most of history, Rutgers has been utterly irrelevant in football and basketball. That is true not merely due to endless losing teams and scant wins worth noting, but also in terms of both university support for the school's athletics and fan interest.

The Rutgers administration treated Rutgers football and basketball as if they should be peers of Princeton, Bucknell, and Lehigh. Fans and sports journalists responded accordingly: They stayed away in droves.

If you had told a group of 100 Rutgers' alums in 1990 that within 20 years Rutgers Stadium would seat almost 53,000 and Rutgers, during a recession in which attendance would drop at most schools in the country, would average just shy of 50,000 per game, at least 99 of those Scarlet Knights fans would have assumed you had sniffed glue to the point of total insanity.

When people today scoff at the idea of Rutgers ever being worth anything to a conference, including the Big East, they are ignoring the previous six years, when the Rutgers administration finally decided to back the program.

The results are obvious: Rutgers has the second largest on-campus stadium among BE members and has the only growing BE fan base

I have said that Syracuse now should be working behind the scenes to persuade the ACC, the only BCS conference that seems to have any respect for any private school not named Notre Dame, to expand to 14. To further this goal, which may prove necessary to prevent it from becoming the next SMU or Rice, Syracuse, I assert, should be concluding with which BE school it would make the most attractive addition for the ACC.

Mulling that, I came to the conclusion that it would be best for Rutgers to be paired with Syracuse in the ACC.

Note my emphasis: I remain uncertain what the best path is for the ACC. Short of Notre Dame joining, there is no option for the ACC that seems clearly the right move to me. But I believe the best thing for Rutgers is the same as the best thing for Syracuse: complete a 14-member ACC.

That, of course, means I see the ACC as better for Rutgers than the Big Ten; it ought to be obvious to all that the BE as a BCS football conference is living on borrowed time, until the Big Ten and/or the ACC takes the pieces they want.

It is unlikely that the ACC will ever have TV deals equal to those of the Big Ten, which is the great reason for Rutgers to want to be in the midwestern conference, but as I examined which BE school would be the best partner for Syracuse to pursue the ACC, I decided with the exception of an annual border state tilt with Penn State, Rutgers would be better served by ACC membership than Big Ten membership.

The key to understanding that is to think about what kind of rivalries Rutgers, being the school it is and located where it is, needs to grow its fan base.

Geographically, Rutgers is in the heart of the northeastern strip of the Atlantic coast, roughly halfway between Boston and Washington, DC. If northeastern sports fans can become more interested in college sports, especially college football, they are most likely to do so based on that geography. People living in the 'middle Atlantic' from the NYC area down to Philadelphia are much more likely to find interest in a conference that stretches up and down the East Coast than they are in a midwestern conference with a couple of eastern outposts.

Schools develop passionate football fan bases primarily due to rivalries, the vast majority of which fit into the school's region. Those rivalry games take on meaning beyond the schools involved. For Rutgers, the four most important rivalry games that could be played annually are: BC (a Boston versus NYC affair), Syracuse (NY state versus NJ), Penn State (PA versus NJ/NYC), and Maryland (Baltimore/DC versus NJ/NYC). 

Due to the 'eastern' sensibility that focuses on the coast, the most important two of that group for Rutgers' future are BC and Maryland: Boston-NY-Philadelphia-Baltimore-DC. 

Yes, Rutgers versus Penn State would mean larger ticket demand at Rutgers Stadium than Rutgers versus BC or Rutgers versus Maryland, but which of those three potential conference series is least likely to develop into a major rivalry that both schools honor?

Rutgers v. PSU.

Why? Because PSU fans would always look at the Ohio State-Michigan game and see Rutgers as unfit to be a major rival for PSU. As Big Ten membership has led most Nits to equate 'major' and 'important' with large attendance, most PSU fans probably would see being paired with Rutgers as a step-down from being paired with Michigan State. They would demand that PSU's great rival be Nebraska, not Rutgers.

But Rutgers with the school finally backing its athletics department could form meaningful rivalries with both BC and Maryland. 

And then there is Miami. The Hurricanes have more TV fans living in the NYC and Philadelphia areas than they do in all of central and north Florida. Because Miami joined the ACC at the time Rutgers was just beginning to invest in football, Rutgers has never hosted Miami, as a conference foe, when Rutgers had a renovated stadium and an energized fan base that would average more fans per home game than Miami. 

Consider the NYC sports press and broadcast interest in Miami, and then imagine the Canes visiting New Brunswick every other year, playing in a renovated, expanded Rutgers Stadium.

That is the kind of extra jolt of electricity the growing Rutgers' fan base needs.

And what would Rutgers bring to the ACC? A growing fan base for the only major college football school located in the NYC TV market. And ultimately, a bridge roughly halfway between Boston and College Park, ending BC's geographic isolation and allowing the ACC to represent the entire East Coast, from New England to South Florida.