FILE: Joe Paterno To Retire At End Of Season

Joe Paterno pushed for Rutgers in the Big Ten long before it happened.

(Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

His father isn't around to see this day, but Jay Paterno knows how he would feel about it. Joe Paterno wouldn't just welcomed a chance to bring his Penn State team to Piscataway to play Rutgers this weekend.

He would have wondered what took so long to make it happen.

“He was never an I-told-you-so guy,” Jay Paterno said over the phone last week. “But he would have said, 'It's about time.' Which, come to think of it, is a politically correct way of saying I told you so.”

He laughed. Long before the Big Ten even considered Rutgers, long before people at Rutgers even thought this day could happen, long before commissioner Jim Delany picked up the phone and rescued this program from the abyss, the Scarlet Knights had a strong advocate in central Pennsylvania.

Joe Paterno, before anyone, wanted the Big Ten to head east. Paterno, before anyone, saw the value that Rutgers – even before it went all in after big-time college football – could bring to a Midwest conference.

“He understood New York and New Jersey and the value of those markets, and the people in those markets, and the money in those markets, quite frankly,” Jay Paterno said. “The New York market is the richest market in the country. He understood all those demographics.”

“He also understood the talent level in the state of New Jersey was so good, and if you look at all the years that Penn State has been good, we've had several talented New Jersey players.”

So as Rutgers prepares to face the Nittany Lions this week – in a conference game, in High Point Solutions Stadium, on the Big Ten Network – New Jersey football fans should take a moment to thank Paterno.

He wasn't the reason the Scarlet Knights ultimately got the invitation – that was Delany, of course, and the seismic shifts in the sport's landscape. But he helped put Rutgers into the conversation long before this day happened.

He was pushing for an all-eastern football conference in the early '80s with Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Temple, Maryland, Syracuse, Rutgers and Boston College, an idea that fell apart when the other schools didn't want to be trounced ever fall by his Nittany Lions.

He pushed Rutgers to join the Big Ten soon after Penn State joined the league in 1990, former PSU athletic director Jim Tarman told me in 2007. “Paterno and I would tell them, `If we can't get Notre Dame, Rutgers should be our first choice,'” Tarman said then, and needless to say, nobody listened.

But he continued to push, in the early 2000s, and again in 2009, and again in 2011 after Syracuse and Pittsburgh joined the ACC. “I think there's a tremendous market for recruiting and football in the area that the schools are moving into,” Joe Paterno said then. “Fifty million people live in the areas that we're talking about,. An awful lot of kids playing football and all sports."

Paterno's legacy is still mixed. Jay Paterno has worked tirelessly, with a new book and public speaking gigs, to reverse the perception that his father should have done more to prevent longtime defensive coach Jerry Sandusky from abusing children in State College, Pa., in a series of horrific crime that landed him in prison.

“The fact is, Joe Paterno didn't witness a crime, he didn't commit a crime, he reported one,” Jay Paterno said. “People are starting to say, 'Why did we fire a guy for following the law?'”

This week is not the time to reopen that debate at Rutgers. This much is clear: Joe Paterno knew, decades before it happened, that there was a place for an overlooked New Jersey university in the Big Ten.

“I think he would have welcomed a season-ending game against Rutgers or Maryland – he'd probably have preferred Rutgers because he's a Brooklyn guy – to create that annual rivalry game between the two schools,” Jay Paterno said. “I think he'd be very happy to know Rutgers' first Big Ten game would be against Penn State.”