But a Big Ten that includes Rutgers is a winner, too. For one thing, fans of, say, Michigan protest too much when they wring hands over blighted traditions and diluted product. Michigan still plays Ohio State in the last game of the regular season every year. And the fact that Purdue has been in the conference since 1896 does not change its 6-28 Big Ten record going back to 2012.

And then there is the money.

The Big Ten’s presence in New Jersey and Maryland — the two states whose flagship universities most recently joined the conference — is often painted purely as a math solution to a math problem: planting flags on the East Coast, including in and near the Washington and New York metropolitan areas, equals more households with more cable cords, and that justifies higher broadcast deals with major stations and more subscriber fees to the Big Ten Network, which is partly owned by the league.

That is all true. In Rutgers’s first year in the conference, the Big Ten Network added eight million homes in the New York City area and experienced a higher-than-expected rise in advertising revenue, according to the network’s president, Mark Silverman. Without Rutgers and Maryland, it is not at all clear that the Big Ten could have secured reported rights deals with ESPN, Fox Sports and CBS Sports worth $250 million annually.

But Rutgers brought other assets, harder to appraise but still valuable. Adding Maryland and Rutgers enabled the conference to credibly schedule its men’s basketball tournaments at Washington’s Verizon Center (this season) and Madison Square Garden (in 2018).

It prevented the Atlantic Coast Conference from adding Rutgers, thereby keeping New Jersey’s rich recruiting soil, long dominated by Big Ten stalwarts like Penn State and Michigan, in the tent. (Last year’s No. 1 overall prospect, the Paramus Catholic defensive lineman Rashan Gary, might have picked Michigan without the promise of playing Rutgers once a year, but it could not have hurt.)

And it may not have been coincidental that Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh chose the aftermath of the Rutgers game to explicitly start a Heisman Trophy campaign for his all-purpose star Jabrill Peppers. (Harbaugh used his postgame comments to compare Peppers to none other than Jim Thorpe, saying, “It just came to me.”) It was the old Notre Dame trick, knowing that the East Coast media establishment would be listening.