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Congratulations, Maryland. You have succeeded in turning a financial mess of an athletic department into a swank new home.



And congratulations to you, too, Rutgers. It appears you're next. Your reward for running up a staggering debt is a huge conference upgrade.

Location, location, location. That's what this latest round of conference realignment is about.

Two largely underachieving, financially irresponsible athletic programs are parlaying their geographic proximity to major metropolitan areas into membership in the Big Ten. They've done very little on the field of competition to deserve it. But that's not what drives conference affiliation these days.

College Sports, Inc., is no meritocracy.

Rutgers and Maryland might as well be the airline and automotive industries. They're losing money left and right, but because they have inherent value (thanks to their TV markets of New York, Washington D.C. and Baltimore), here comes the institutional bailout.

[Related: Maryland opts for Big Ten TV money over ACC tradition]

Maryland is facing a $50 million exit fee from the Atlantic Coast Conference, just months after dropping seven athletic programs in July in an attempt to get itself out of multimillion-dollar debt. The students who worked year-round to compete in those programs – and who tend to graduate at a high rate – were expendable in order for the Terrapins to keep up with the Joneses in revenue sports. If the Under Armour booster cares more about 57 combinations of football uniforms than having a swim team, it's expendable.

In the last decade, Maryland expanded its football stadium to 54,000 and built a palatial basketball arena in order to chase additional glory and cash. It acquired neither. While spending increased 24 percent over the last five years, according to the Washington Post, revenues increased only 15 percent.

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All the money and gear in the world hasn't been able to make the Terrapins anything other than a gridiron embarrassment the past two years. They're 6-17 under Randy Edsall, who is being paid $2 million a year for that record.

And while Maryland will immediately become the most recent Big Ten school to win a basketball national championship (2002), it hasn't accomplished much recently in the school's signature sport, either. The Terrapins missed the NCAA tournament last season, their first under Mark Turgeon ($1.9 million annually), and have missed four of the past seven tourneys.

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