“We hope the situation improves,” he added, “but we are glad that Rutgers is in the Big Ten.”

The reasoning has a lot to do with geography. Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer, who will lead his top-ranked Buckeyes into Piscataway on Saturday night for a nationally televised game, said that New Jersey had “as good high school football as anywhere in the country, and obviously a ridiculous amount of TV sets.”

Those TV sets may help the Big Ten negotiate a blockbuster new television deal in the next year, and they have already helped the Big Ten Network, according to its president, Mark Silverman. The network, which is now in more than 60 million homes nationally, added eight million subscribers in the New York metropolitan area in the past year, a period that coincided with Rutgers’s first year as an associate member of the Big Ten. It also experienced a 20 percent year-over-year rise in advertising revenue — more than twice what would have been expected without conference growth.

Rutgers also has further raised the conference’s profile in the country’s media capital. Without Rutgers, it would be difficult to imagine the Big Ten staging its basketball championship tournament at Madison Square Garden, as it will in 2018.

And while the change has been a money loser so far for Rutgers, which at $36.3 million last year had the largest subsidy to its athletic department of virtually any public college in Division I, as calculated by USA Today, sports may soon be able to pay their own way: In just a few years, Rutgers will begin receiving a full member’s cut of the Big Ten’s exploding media revenue.

In this context, even the staunchest critics of big-time athletics at Rutgers have acknowledged the Big Ten’s sheer financial pull.