It has been hard to pass a highway or a tollbooth in New Jersey over the past three years without a billboard declaring “Rutgers Is Big.”

Big as in Big Ten, the powerful college sports conference that the state university joined in 2014 on the promise that it would vault Rutgers into big-time academics as well as athletics. With televised games beaming into millions of homes across the country, Rutgers could draw top students and top athletes, rake in revenue to make up for money the state had cut and finally achieve the prestige that the faculty and alumni have long thought it deserved.

So far, though, Big has mostly meant big headaches.

The big payday has yet to arrive. When boosters pushed to fire the football coach after a bad season two years ago, the university could not afford to buy him out, a member of a Rutgers governing board said.

Last week, the coach finally wore out his welcome after a terrible season on field and off. Six players were dismissed after they were arrested in a series of home invasions and an off-campus assault. Another had been suspended after accusations that he assaulted a woman outside a game. An investigation found that the coach had improperly pressured a faculty member to improve a grade for a top recruit who had become ineligible to play.