Ladies and gentlemen, it's finally Rutgers Week.
Just hearing those two words in succession as the calendar flips to October sends shivers down your pumpkin-spiced spine. Rutgers Week. It's that tingly, out-of-place non-conference feeling right in the middle of conference play, or in Ohio State's case coming off an early bye - the very beginning of it.
We're into our third ironic decade of LOL The Big Ten Can't Count and that tingle has only gotten weirder. Two seasons ago as Ohio State was embarking on its national championship run it opened conference play against ancient rivals - the Terrapins, Scarlet Knights and Nittany Lions. The Buckeyes did not face a single team from the Big Ten until November.
Current students have no memory of independent Penn State with a stoic Joe Paterno trotting the sideline, but State College as a B1G campus doesn't require mental gymnastics. Pennsylvania is Ohio's wacky neighbor; it makes enough sense. Nebraska in 2011 was an even milder adoption process. It's Iowa with larger front yards and one famous billionaire.
Nebraska is also historically competent with a football, which is something to admire. Maryland has won national championships in men's basketball and soccer during the current century as well as in a whole slew of women's sports - this is also good. So what is Rutgers?
Yes. What is Rutgers. This brings us back to Rutgers Week so let's take a quick peek at the enemy's preparation for the Buckeyes:
whoevers been spraypainting the dickbutts around rutgers is doing gods work
— spooky bastard (@ArhoonS) September 26, 2016
Rutgers is a geographical bookend that slides Penn State closer to the middle of the Big Ten's shelf. It represents an area populated primarily by Notre Dame or NFL enthusiasts. Its most successful head coach in 147 years of football currently lives in Columbus and runs Ohio State's defense. Greg Schiano was responsible for four of Rutgers' five bowl game victories. Ever.
The school claims two national championships. The second one was in fencing. That happened 67 years ago when America's fiercest swashbucklers were probably off hunting Nazis in Argentina. The Buckeyes have won four fencing national titles; three since Rutgers in 1949. Ohio State is the reigning fencing national runner-up, actually. The Big Ten was not in need of a fencing power or a fencing has-been. We digress.
The first and only other national championship Rutgers owns came in 1869, in football. That season there were only two teams: Rutgers and what is now Princeton. There was no preseason poll that year but if there had been - the two schools would have been ranked 1-2 in some order, and people would have still whined about it.
Rutgers won the first-ever football game 6-4. A week later there was a rematch which Rutgers lost 0-8. That was how the first football season went down; just two precious Saturdays to avoid getting married. There was no controversy when the only two teams in America then shared the national championship. This is Rutgers.
Happy 1st anniversary to Kansas vs Rutgers. Of all the football games I have been to, it was certainly one of them. pic.twitter.com/OpBdasAUQ8
— Ryan Stites (@Brocktoon23) September 26, 2016
There are many words to describe Rutgers but the most relevant and unemotional one is necessary. The Big Ten's legacy population footprint is projected to grow at 5.4% through 2030. Its contemporaries were going to leave it in the dust - 28.9% for the Pac-12, 22.4% for the Big XII, 25.9% for the SEC and 18.6% for the ACC, all of which have expanded; with the Big XII being a yo-yo dieter thanks to Nebraska and Colorado.
So adopting Maryland/DC/Virginia metro and the New York metro meant adding a whole bunch of people in places that are growing faster. B1G Country didn't add a lot of land as much as it took on millions of citizens, current and unborn. The academics were worthy of admission. Maryland's athletics are plenty good enough to clear the bar; after all this is a conference that has Purdue as an original member.
Meanwhile, Rutgers' athletics...what is Rutgers.
Rutgers pep band. Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
I live a half-hour from Rutgers' campus. It's absolutely charming. New Jersey is wonderful. For me personally, Rutgers belonging to the Big Ten is an oddly local and constant reinforcement that I am an alien from the Midwest. College football culture in New Jersey is in no way anything like it is in a quintessential Big Ten town which is every one of the first dozen - even you, Minneapolis.
Rutgers knows this and is expediting evolution's role in it getting there. B1G affiliation reminders are all over the place, even in Manhattan where the mere existence of Rutgers and New Jersey beyond the Newark Airport is merely a rumor. It is accelerating its B1G bonafides with urgency. Put simply, it is committed to becoming something more befitting of a conference membership that will pull it out of budgetary squalor.
This initial overpromotion of its conference affiliation is as necessary and awkward as Rutgers' admission into the conference. The Big Ten already had an athletics doormat and now it has another, but unlike the outright check-cashing going on in West Lafayette, New Brunswick appears to give a damn about its vanity. It may take a while, but the Scarlet Knights are intent on becoming a huge pain in the ass. Someday.
So we know what Rutgers is, what it's assumed to serve for the conference and what it aspires to someday be with the assistance of its new, wealthy family. But as for right now, it's Rutgers Week which ironically affords it the opportunity to serve a traditional Big Ten role for Ohio State as its alumni flock back to campus: A warm body for a joyous Homecoming bloodbath.
