It’s been hard to pass a highway or a tollbooth in New Jersey over the last 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.