I didn't expect this mid-June column about Big Ten finances and Rutgers to spark a minor Friday firestorm on Twitter. But it did, and with more than 200 comments and a more @ mentions than I could possibly process, it felt worthy of a quick follow-up post.

So here goes:

1. My goodness, Big Ten fans love to hate on Rutgers. Not all of them, of course -- travel to (nearly) any Big Ten town, and you'll find folks who are welcoming and engaging about their newest conference foe. But let's just say it's hard to find many of them on Twitter, where demeaning all things related to the Scarlet Knights feels like a new sport sometimes. Some of it is funny. Some of it is unnecessarily mean. And Rutgers fans, as Aaron Breitman from "On The Banks" points out, should embrace it all. It's hard not to wonder: What will it be like if Rutgers actually gets good one of these years?

2. Indiana: Lacking self awareness in the Heartland. My favorite response from flyover country comes from an Indiana fan blog. Yes, that Indiana! All these decades, they must have been like the fifth kid in the family begging mom and dad to have No. 6 so they could finally have someone to push around. When the Big Ten added Rutgers, they must have felt like Bobby Brady did when Mike and Carol adopted cousin Oliver. You know what? I'm happy for them.

3. Competitiveness has nothing to do with this. Not sure why I have to explain this, but the fact that Rutgers has one conference victory in football over the past two seasons is not relevant to this discussion. You are wasting my time and yours if you're firing off 140-character missives about Rutgers stinking up the place. This is about television markets.

4. Yes, for the billionth time, they had to take the deal.

I thought, by dedicating to the first six paragraphs to this point, that I would get it across: Rutgers had zero leverage, faced an uncertain future and had to take whatever the Big Ten was offering. And yet several email/comments suggests that perhaps I still failed to hammer that across, so for emphasis:

OF COURSE RUTGERS HAD TO TAKE WHATEVER JIM DELANY WAS OFFERING!

5. That doesn't make it a good deal. "The deals that were negotiated were all negotiated on the basis of keep us whole, keep you whole, and after six years of being a member of the Big Ten, you'll then become a full financial member," Delany said last year. But his conference has negotiated a massive new TV rights package, and the expanded footprint of the Big Ten helped make that possible. Fans in Michigan can snicker about the "New York market," but their favorite schools are laughing all the way to the bank. And they have Rutgers, in large part, to thank for that.

6. A bad Rutgers is bad for the Big Ten. Look, I get it: Giving Rutgers more money isn't going to make the football team better overnight, and Delany has made it abundantly clear that a deal is a deal. But finances play a role in everything in college athletics. If Delany cringes when a 78-0 game is on his prized Big Ten Network, he should remember that he didn't exactly make life easier in Piscataway.

7. Yes, Maryland and Nebraska also received less. The Big Ten used projections from what its new members were expected to make from their old conferences. Maryland, negotiating from a position of relative strength, asked for money up front to pay off its exit fee from the ACC. Nebraska banked $14 million its first year after fleeing the Big 12, with that payment increasing to about $22 million in 2016. That's still far more than Rutgers, and for a university in the 76th biggest TV market in the country.

8. I'm still dumbstruck by this number: $177 million. That's how much more schools like Iowa and Northwestern will have earned from their Big Ten deals than Rutgers if the current league payout ($51.1 million) stays the same over the next three years. That is a big pot of cash, and it means that Rutgers will be playing catch up for years to come.

Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevePoliti. Find NJ.com on Facebook.