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.

Still trying to recuperate from yesterday, recap will be available in later. In the meantime, let's look at some happier news. The Star-Ledger has a great look today about how Tim Pernetti, Robert Barchi, and Greg Brown helped Rutgers join the BIg Ten.

It's Miller time! Rutgers is always expected to recruit well in its backyard in the Greater Middlesex Conference. Step one worked out well with star Piscataway corner Nadir Barnwell, and now the Knights have another building block on the offensive line with Dorian Miller from Metuchen, their top interior line target. Miller is the younger brother of receiver Dejuan Miller, who looked hard at Rutgers several years back before committing to Oklahoma. Offensive line is not at all a need for the program after a killer 2012 class, but you always want to bring in two-three players there a year, so this commitment is important in that respect.

The verdict? Rutgers isn't PSU or Nebraska in terms of national draw, but they have the biggest NYC foothold. In terms of overall support, it's very competitive nationally, but would be in a tier with Illinois and Minnesota in the Big Ten. Fair enough. His data also shows that Rutgers fares pretty well comparatively with the other expansion options. I have two objections to the piece though: 1. Rutgers has less fans than Nebraska for instance, but those 938k Rutgers fans will have a much higher income than 1.23m Nebraska fans, and hence will be far more valuable as a television audience. 2. The assertion that the Eastern schools would "quality of the average Big Ten football game" isn't really backed up by evidence. Maryland, sure, now, but they aren't that far removed from being successful, and are just a good hire away from improving. Rutgers on the other hand would be better than the mean Big Ten team by most statistical metrics. P.S. For more on Nate Silver, click here.