This Louisville piece by Pat Forde is quite good, in a vacuum, and I agree with every word of it. What's disconcerting however is Forde's hypocritical treatment (as a Louisville homer) of Maryland and Rutgers last week. How is there a substantive difference between the cases? From this vantage point, there are far more similarities than meaningful differences. Behold, the power of tone and weasel words. Reading Forde, you would never know that Louisville athletics operated on a ten million dollar subsidy last year, which has been the norm of late for them in some respect. In fact, as Dan Wolken (no friend of Big Ten expansion) pointed out earlier on Twitter, Rutgers has been the far more successful program over the past six years. Obviously, that is wholly attributable to Steve Kragthorpe's incompetence, but Rutgers fans can just as easily argue that their program is unfairly judged/weighted down by Terry Shea's disastrous tenure in the late 90s, which was far, far worse than the historical norm for Rutgers football. The fact is, any endpoints you want to pick for the programs are completely arbitrary, given the current sad state of Maryland football compared to the success at Louisville and Rutgers. What matters is future projections, and there isn't really any credible, objective argument out there as to why Rutgers and Louisville both won't be able to carve out a good measure of success in their new homes. In fact, the Rutgers case would probably go even further and argue that Maryland will be a boon to the Big Ten as well once they can Randy Edsall and find a better coach.