The four officials from Rutgers boarded an eight-seat Cessna jet at Morristown Airport for a business trip that, if successful, would transform the university in ways that even they could not fully comprehend.
And if it wasn’t?
Failure meant the athletic teams in Piscataway were doomed to a competitive purgatory that likely would destroy the dream of having big-time college sports in New Jersey. Failure was not an option.
It was Nov. 4, 2012. The Big Ten was nearing the end of a long process to add two universities to its prestigious conference. Rutgers, against all odds, was in position to become one of them at a secret meeting in Washington, D.C.
Rutgers, which had struggled throughout most of its century-and-a-half pursuit of athletic glory, was on the doorstep of securing a spot in a powerhouse league at a time of unprecedented uncertainty in college sports.
The deal, however, was not done.
Tim Pernetti, the athletic director at Rutgers, had spent much of his first three years in that job working behind the scenes to land this meeting. He canceled dinner plans with his wife, Danielle, to celebrate their 17th wedding anniversary. He already had missed so much family time chasing this moment. What was one more night?
Janine Purcaro, the athletic department’s chief financial officer, wouldn’t even tell her family where she was going because she knew even one leak might ruin the entire deal. Her teenage son eyed her curiously when she left for the airport — what kind of accountant has a business trip on a Sunday night? — and she couldn’t blame him.
Robert Barchi, the third member of the traveling party, was dragged out of his house despite being sick with the flu. The university president was on the job just six months and spent the 35-minute flight “getting facts shoved into his brain,” as Purcaro put it, about the ever-shifting world of conference affiliations. He needed to be ready.
Jason Baum, the athletic department’s communications director, was the fourth passenger, and his presence on that plane brought great optimism. The Big Ten officials had never given Rutgers confirmation that a deal was imminent — it was always if it happens, and not when — but why would the league want to map out a public relations strategy if the two sides weren’t getting close?
The Cessna touched down at Washington National Airport at 7:05 p.m. The traveling party took a car service to the Four Seasons hotel where a small, nondescript conference room had been reserved. It was a three-hour meeting that, for Rutgers, could change everything.
The Big Ten was waiting.
Television over tradition
One decade ago this month, Rutgers found itself at a crossroads.
It could land a much-coveted spot in one of the five major athletic conferences, securing its competitive and financial future for decades. Or, it could find itself forever stuck with the have-nots of college sports, a fate that would leave its 24 teams facing irrelevancy or, worse, extinction.
It could end up in a conference with powerhouses like Michigan and Ohio State, playing for the highest of stakes on a national stage. Or, it could find itself without a stable home like Connecticut, existing on shoestring budgets while trying to recruit high school athletes under a cloud of uncertainty.
“If we had not gotten this done,” Barchi said, “I’m not sure we would still have Division I football and basketball at the level we do now.”
The Big Ten provided much more than a stable home for athletics. For Rutgers, it meant an association with other massive research universities that would give it the kind of gravitas it had long desired. It meant unprecedented national exposure via the league’s cable network, increased applications and donations, and even opportunities to expand its academic programs and research.
It was, quite simply, transformational.
And few believed it would ever happen.
“My initial reaction when I was pursuing the story was just, ‘WHAT?’” said Brett McMurphy, the national college football reporter who broke the news on ESPN. “I was surprised because Rutgers hadn’t exactly been world-beaters.”
For the first time, officials from Rutgers and the Big Ten involved in those pivotal negotiations have agreed to tell the behind-the-scenes story of how this unlikely union became a reality.
In dozens of interviews with NJ Advance Media over a span of six months, they described the years-long lobbying efforts that preceded the invitation, the crucial moments that pushed a conference with midwestern roots toward its eastward expansion and the secret negotiations that produced a controversial financial agreement.
The narrative is especially relevant today as the landscape shifts again in ways that many believe could reshape college sports for another generation. Long before Southern Cal and UCLA made their surprising move to the Big Ten this summer, it was Rutgers and Maryland that maneuvered themselves into the conference with an eye on long-term stability and a game-changing windfall.
The moves were confirmation that tradition mattered little in modern college sports, that national rankings and bowl trips weren’t nearly as important as market size and TV revenue to a conference that was determined to put its eponymous cable network in households far beyond its traditional footprint.
“Does the visibility and the success of football contribute to this? Absolutely it does,” Pernetti said. “But based on where things were going in the industry, and growth of networks and media, the New York market was going to be taken by someone at some point. I was very confident about that.”
He wasn’t alone.
Jim Delany, one of the most powerful men in college sports at the time, had long believed in the potential of expanding east — and in the state university considered a sleeping giant in athletics.
An unlikely ally
As Delany tells it, Rutgers wasn’t only on the Big Ten’s expansion radar for only a few months or years. This was an idea that dates back decades.
The Big Ten was a stable, almost staid, conference for most of its history. The league didn’t change at all from 1951, the year Michigan State joined, to 1990. A year earlier, it had plucked a little-known commissioner from the Ohio Valley Conference to take over its reins, the start of one of college sport’s most influential careers.
Delany, 74, was still new at his job when Penn State — then an independent with no league affiliation — reached out to the conference to initiate membership. It seems like a no-brainer in hindsight given the State College, Pa., university’s storied athletic history, but Delany called the “top-down process” of adding the Nittany Lions “poorly executed,” and it shaped his view of how to handle expansion.
It also added an unlikely advocate for further eastward expansion: Joe Paterno.
The longtime Penn State coach believed that 11 was an awkward number for a conference and that a natural East Coast rival should be next to join the conference. Paterno pushed for Rutgers from the beginning — and that continued when two of his former assistants, Dick Anderson and Greg Schiano, became head coaches in Piscataway.
“Penn State always was interested in going to 12 (members),” Delany said in a rare interview since stepping down as Big Ten commissioner in 2019. “Penn State always was very supportive of Rutgers. They did a lot of recruiting there. Dick Anderson was a Penn State guy. Schiano had been on the staff. There were a lot of connections there.”
Months after the Big Ten added Penn State, Rutgers sent what was described in newspaper accounts as “an extensive report” to the league in late 1990 seeking consideration as its 12th member. The 75-page package, entitled “Advantage: Rutgers” is the first known formal outreach, and it concentrated on the influential alumni, academic standing and — in an important bit of foreshadowing — the size of the New York and Philadelphia television markets.
The Big Ten had just instituted a four-year moratorium on expansion, and it is not known if the league gave the package serious consideration beyond a polite acknowledgement.
Delany didn’t need anyone to introduce him to Rutgers. He grew up in South Orange, graduating from St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark and Seton Hall. He knew that Rutgers had enjoyed some sporadic success in basketball and football over the years, but from a commitment level, had not invested in athletics the same way the Midwest powerhouses had.
Simply put: Rutgers wasn’t Big Ten material. Yet.
“I thought there was great potential because of the state and the resources, and that the fan base would eventually come alive,” Delany said. “But Rutgers was way, way, way behind in terms of its development, not academically, but athletically. They had played at a different level, with a different amount of support, with a different fan base. I was under no illusions about that.”
That started to change in the mid-2000s. As Schiano built a program that climbed into the top 10 nationally, the head coach became convinced that the Scarlet Knights were a poor fit in the Big East. At the end of his weekly radio show one night in 2002, he turned to Pernetti and made a blunt statement: “We’re in the wrong (bleeping) league.”
“We belonged in the Big Ten. It made so much sense,” Schiano said. “Delany got sick of seeing me because I brought it up every time I saw him.”
The Scarlet Knights, meanwhile, were proving that it was possible to win in college football at Rutgers — and, even more importantly, that fans in the massive New York/New Jersey television market would watch when they did.
The latter mattered to the Big Ten, which in 2007 had gambled on its own brand and launched the Big Ten Network. This was Delany’s baby, and he knew getting it into as many households as possible would be a financial boon.
A long period of conference stability was coming to an end in college sports, with the ACC raiding the Big East for Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College in 2004 and 2005. Delany, regarded as one of the savviest leaders in the NCAA, understood two things: 1. That he was dealing from a position of power and could afford to be patient. 2. It was only a matter of time before the Big Ten would expand again.
The league finally announced, in December 2009, that it was “looking at expansion.” Rutgers officials flew to North Carolina during that process for an exploratory meeting with Delany, multiple sources confirmed, but left with no assurances that the Big Ten would expand at all. Still, they were hopeful.
Six months later, the league added one school — Nebraska — and declared that it had no plans to expand again in the “foreseeable future.” The music was about to stop, and it appeared that Rutgers would be left without a chair.
An aggressive new athletic director in Piscataway didn’t see it that way. Pernetti was convinced that the process was just beginning.
‘I became obsessed’
In March 2009, Pernetti had registered in a New Brunswick hotel under a fake name while he was interviewing for the vacant job as Rutgers athletic director. He was seen as a natural candidate, a former football player for the Scarlet Knights who not only was around the team as its radio color analyst but had a long résumé in the TV side of college sports.
He also had an important name on his list of references: Delany.
The two men had worked together on TV rights deals in the past and developed a strong relationship, with Pernetti often using their interactions to ask where his alma mater fit in the changing college sports landscape. The night before his final interview, Delany called Pernetti and asked if there was anything he could do to help him get the job.
“We had a quick chat, and before we hung up, I said, ‘Hey, if I get this, what do you think the chances are (of Rutgers getting into the Big Ten)?’” Pernetti said. “I remember him saying something like, ‘less than five percent’ or ‘not very good.’ I said, ‘That’s good enough for me!’ And that was the end of the conversation.
“I was on a mission. I became obsessed with it.”
The mission started immediately. Delany and Pernetti would not comment specifically on the Big Ten’s process before it added Nebraska — both men said the details were still protected by a nondisclosure agreement — but multiple sources confirmed that Rutgers was one of about a half-dozen schools under consideration.
Pernetti said he wasn’t disappointed when Nebraska was chosen. He knew the Cornhuskers were a “tried-and-true, bonafide brand” with a national profile. He also believed that realignment was far from over.
“I was confident that the landscape was going to shift multiple times in the next few years, and I was confident in what we had,” Pernetti said. “We started to tell that story. When the Nebraska announcement happened, everyone panicked. But I felt good.”
Telling that story became a job unto itself. To help him, Pernetti hired Purcaro as his CFO, and she became one of a handful of people in the Rutgers universe who knew the scope of the behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts.
Together, they built a portfolio on Rutgers’ selling points. They pointed to the growth of season ticket sales, projected financials and improved fundraising. They handed over the athletic department’s five-year plan. They included academic rankings that sold Rutgers as “the complete package” — and made it clear that package would benefit the Big Ten’s bottom line almost immediately.
“It’s not enough to just say, ‘Hey here’s what we bring to the table,’” Purcaro said. “You had to show it. We talked about how Rutgers and this market would increase the distribution of the Big Ten Network from 30 percent of the country to 40 percent. We tried to put dollars around a lot of these things.”
Pernetti and Purcaro did all the work on their own, often long after business hours, because they feared the wrong document left on the wrong copy machine might lead to a devastating leak. Every document was listed as a draft to keep it from being available to the public via the open records act.
“You know how things are at Rutgers,” Purcaro said. “Nothing is private.”
Pernetti kept a weekly call with Delany, usually at 7:30 a.m. when he was getting in his morning workout on the treadmill, which he called “the most informal and consistent dialogue I ever had with anybody in the business.”
Even if the conversations were just industry gossip, Pernetti knew he was building a relationship.
“I also knew Jim well enough to understand that anyone who spent any time politicking would be cut off the list,” Pernetti said. “I felt very strongly about that. I wouldn’t have done it anyway, but I knew the way he operated.”
That doesn’t mean he went radio silent with the media. When Syracuse tried to position itself as “New York’s College Team” in a marketing campaign, Pernetti went on the offensive. He knew Rutgers’ position in the New York market was — by far — its biggest selling point to any conference.
“I was very quickly able to put together the top-10-rated college football games in the New York market and slip that information to a lot of folks in the press I knew,” Pernetti said. “Syracuse played in zero of those games. Rutgers played in every one of them. I saw that as an opening.”
All the work, however, had not produced tangible results. In 2011, Texas A&M and Missouri jumped to the SEC, and more concerning, Pittsburgh and Syracuse delivered a death blow to the Big East when they jumped to the ACC.
With the Big Ten still seemingly content to stay at 12 teams, Rutgers looked like it was running out of options. The fan base noticed.
“If word starts to leak, everything unravels,” Purcaro said. “So Tim couldn’t come out and say, ‘Hey message boards,’ I’ve got this.
“We met up after one football game and he said, ‘Well, it’s getting bad out there.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ People were throwing soda bottles at him in the stands, screaming at him, ‘Get us out of this conference. You’re not doing anything. This whole thing is falling apart.’ The fans were crazy.”
Finally, opportunity knocks
The situation did, indeed, look grim.
The Big East was on fire. TCU pulled out of an agreement to join the league as a football-only member. West Virginia was jockeying for a spot in the Big 12. What remained looked so bleak that Schiano, who previously had turned down jobs at Michigan and Miami to stay in New Jersey, left for the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers in January 2012.
“I didn’t want to go to the NFL. I had never prepared for that — it was the only thing in my life that I didn’t prepare for,” Schiano said. “After 11 years as head coach, to not be in a Power Five conference seemed unsustainable.”
Finally, on Sept. 13, 2012, something broke Rutgers’ way: Notre Dame announced it was joining the ACC for all sports other than football. For decades, the Big Ten had coveted the South Bend, Indiana, powerhouse, believing that its tradition, academic reputation and location made it a perfect fit for the conference.
Now that was out the window.
“It was important,” Delany said of Notre Dame’s decision. “It was just obvious that the map was changing. We thought, OK, now what’s possible? If you looked south, it didn’t look like that was going to work much, or west, there wasn’t anything there.”
Most college sports insiders believed they were entering a period of relative calm with conference realignment. The ACC had jacked its exit fee up to $50 million in an effort to prevent defections. Delany, unlike with the Nebraska move three years earlier, had made no public statements about exploring expansion.
Even Pernetti wasn’t sure where things were headed — but, as he had for the past three years, he kept the dialogue with Delany open. When the Rutgers football team traveled to Arkansas for a Sept. 22, 2012, test against an SEC foe, Pernetti packed his golf clubs in hopes of sneaking in a round in the warmer weather.
Years earlier, he had attended the Big Ten meetings and won a travel cover with the conference logo in a closest-to-the-pin contest. He noticed the clubs sitting on the tarmac and texted Delany a photo with the comment, “Headed to Arkansas.” The Big Ten commissioner encouraged him to beat former Michigan State coach John L. Smith, and when Delany congratulated Pernetti after the Scarlet Knights pulled off the victory the next day, his next message raised the athletic director’s eyebrows.
“We should talk soon.”
Just like that, after years of waiting and hoping, the conversations with the Big Ten were about to move at warp speed. The conference, quiet since adding Nebraska, had decided behind the scenes that it was time to make another move. And, with Notre Dame out of the picture, only one move made sense.
“We really wanted to focus on the East Coast,” said longtime Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith, one of the league’s most influential figures. “Rutgers emerged early in the process. Many of us had relationships with people at Rutgers at that time. Rutgers had a history. We felt like it fit.”
Plus, perhaps most of all, Smith added this: “The location was perfect.”
It was not the recent success of the football team that mattered to the Big Ten, although that certainly helped ease concerns. It was not the $100-million expansion of SHI Stadium, either, that made Rutgers a possible candidate — none of the facilities, in fact, “were considered or discussed during the run-up to expansion,” Delany said.
It mattered that Rutgers was part of the prestigious Association of American Universities, and that its profile as a large, land-grant, public university fit with the other 12 members of the conference. But, above all else, Rutgers was on the Big Ten’s short list of expansion candidates for one reason.
It was the market.
Pernetti understood this from the start. The Big Ten charges cable providers within its “footprint” more to offer its network — about $1 per household, compared to a dime in other areas of the country — which would mean a massive windfall for the conference.
“I knew the market was a foundational piece of getting this done,” Pernetti said. “That, in my mind, was the coveted asset that was going to be the foundation, that was going to be the driving force, and honestly, I felt like someone put me there for a reason.”
Rutgers had a meeting with the Big Ten at an O’Hare Airport Hilton in early October, and the first order of business was signing a nondisclosure agreement. Pernetti, at the request of conference officials, gave a presentation filled with data about the university but also TV ratings, market size and branding.
The Big Ten, in turn, explained that a partnership would extend well beyond athletics, and outlined how integration would work on its end if it decided to expand.
And if was the key word. The New Jersey contingent was encouraged by how the meeting played out, but Delany offered no assurances that the league would do anything in the coming weeks, months or even years.
“I wouldn’t want to play poker with that guy,” Purcaro said.
A negotiation in D.C.
The conversations continued, almost daily, over the phone for the next five weeks. Lawyers from both sides had gotten involved, and from inside the Rutgers athletic offices, optimism grew by the day. Then came the invitation to meet again in Washington.
Not wanting to risk detection if a fan recognized him at Newark Airport and posted something on social media, Pernetti had secured use of a donor’s private jet. As the four-person traveling party boarded it in Morristown on Nov. 4, one question dominated the conversation.
Why were they flying to D.C.?
Pernetti had a hunch, of course, but he wouldn’t know for sure until the news leaked out weeks later. The Big Ten wanted to add two schools, and Maryland — a member of the ACC since its inception in 1953, located in the nation’s ninth-biggest television market — had emerged as the other target.
(He also didn’t know that Maryland was meeting with the Big Ten earlier that very same day. Delany, never one to leave anything to chance, made sure that the officials from the two universities did not run into each other by scheduling the meetings at different D.C. hotels — Maryland at the InterContinental, Rutgers at the Four Seasons — about a mile apart.)
Rutgers would not get an invitation to the Big Ten unless Maryland completed its own far more complicated and controversial deal. News of a potential Maryland move had leaked out on a message board on Nov. 11, and the fan base was divided.
“I would just say Maryland was a charter member of a healthy conference,” Delany said. “Rutgers was in a conference that wasn’t stable. You can deduce from that.”
Maryland, unlike Rutgers, had leverage. The school’s athletic department was mired in debt and had cut seven sports a year earlier, but it aggressively pursued a deal to secure an advance on its future earnings to pay a $52 million exit fee from the ACC.
Rutgers, still in the crumbling Big East, had no such luxury.
But Pernetti knew this meeting would be the best case for Rutgers to impress on the Big Ten that the university deserved a bigger slice of revenues because of its increased travel costs, the need for capital improvements in Piscataway and the hope the Scarlet Knights could “hit the ground running” when it joined the league.
“We had done our homework,” Purcaro said. “We knew what we had and that we weren’t going to settle for less than Rutgers was due. We knew bringing Rutgers in was going to bring significant revenue to all the other schools, too.”
The Big Ten had offered a six-year integration period during which Rutgers would receive the same revenues it would have gotten from the Big East (and, later, the American Athletic Conference). The six years correlated with the end of the Big Ten’s media rights deals, which is when Rutgers would then receive an equal revenue share.
A potential deal was struck, the details of which the league kept a closely guarded secret — even keeping the lone copy of the agreement so that it could not be subject to an OPRA request through New Jersey public records law. Rutgers would receive $8.6 million in 2015, its first year in the league, and that would rise to $10.6 million in 2020, documents would show.
Those figures would be scrutinized for years, including this summer when the Big Ten announced that USC and UCLA would receive full shares right away. But the circumstances were far different, and Delany — ever the shrewd poker player — had much of the information locked down.
“The model was laid out pretty clearly by then,” Barchi said. “There wasn’t much negotiating room, and we really had no comps to go on. We didn’t know what was happening with Maryland, and we didn’t have much in the way of comparable data to move forward with.”
The Big Ten continued to talk about a deal in terms of if, not when, but a chunk of the meeting involved plans for a potential announcement. The league wanted to know specifics. Where would a press conference be held? What media could the league expect to attend?
Rutgers would spend the next two and a half weeks hammering out the details in a series of phone calls with Big Ten officials. Nothing was official when the traveling party walked out of that meeting, but it certainly felt that way.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is really happening,’” Purcaro said. “We had worked so hard for months and months and months. We had a moment of joy, elation, pride, and then it was, ‘Next! We’ve still got work to do.’”
The flight back to Morristown landed after 1 o’clock on Monday morning. They were back in the office a few hours later.
Buh-bye, Big East
The news broke on Nov. 17 when the football team, already in high spirits from a huge road victory, was flying back from Cincinnati. First, the airplane’s cabin filled with beeps from cellphones as it touched ground. Then, that noise was replaced with an audible buzz as the players and coaches read the texts from friends.
Then, it was a roar of delight.
The press conference was held three days later in the team room at the Hale Center, the football headquarters. Even that morning, with the deal figuratively on the one-foot line, it was a mad scramble at Rutgers to complete the details.
Purcaro had to fax a notification letter to the remaining seven Big East presidents — “Fax it! On a fax machine!” she said, still incredulous — as part of the exit requirements. Then, she had to have $2.5 million wired to the Big East as part of the $10 million exit fee, which again was no small feat given the university’s notorious inelasticity.
“We didn’t tell the Big East until we were walking out the door,” Purcaro said. “Here’s your letter. Here’s your check. Buh-bye.”
Delany already was talking about an integration plan that involved a New York City office for his conference, as well as conference basketball tournaments in the city. To make sure the commissioner saw that this new relationship was a two-way street, the athletic department purchased video-board time on the New Jersey Turnpike to ensure he was greeted with a message when he arrived from Newark Airport.
“WE R B1G.”
The press conference wasn’t a victory lap. For starters, the grind of the previous two months finally had caught up to Pernetti, who was nursing a cold. He tried and failed to nap in his office but was refueled when — in perfect Jersey fashion — someone on his staff brought him a Taylor ham, egg and cheese bagel.
The well-wishers were nonstop. One of them was Greg Brown, an influential donor and a member of the university’s Board of Governors, who called Pernetti a few hours before the official announcement.
“He told me that I had changed the path of Rutgers University forever,” Pernetti said. “And I cried. I think at that moment, emotionally, it caught me what was really happening.”
The joy, however, was short lived.
The football team lost its final three games, missing a chance to exit the Big East with a spot in the Orange Bowl. A scandal involving basketball coach Mike Rice, caught on tape verbally and physically abusing his players at practice, became the lead story on every national nightly newscast for almost a week in April 2013.
Just 136 days after Pernetti posed for photos with Delany at that press conference, the athletic director was forced to resign. Pernetti, now the chief operating officer at IMG Performance, has only returned to Rutgers once — when his friend Eric LeGrand, the paralyzed former football player, had his jersey retired.
“I know how hard he worked. I know how important it was to him,” said Purcaro, who also left the university in 2017 and is now chief operating officer for the Institute of Advanced Study. “To have the university turn its back on him when the Mike Rice scandal happened was a hard pill to swallow.”
The entrance into the Big Ten in 2014, which should have been a time of celebration, was one of frustration, scandal and — with the football and basketball teams in decline — second-guessing from the national media and Big Ten fans.
The complete picture from the past 10 years, however, has provided ample evidence that the Rutgers-Big Ten marriage was a success for both sides.
The Big Ten, which almost immediately benefited from adding its network to the millions of cable boxes in the New York market, signed a seven-year, $8 billion media rights deal this summer that broke records for a college conference. The addition of USC and UCLA, and by extension the Los Angeles market, made it clear that location is every bit as important as the institutions when a conference expands.
“I’m a human being, so nobody likes to be criticized,” Delany said. “You’d rather be right than wrong, but you’re really paid to make tough decisions. Rutgers and Maryland were not ‘no-brainers.’ I saw what was happening on a global basis and I thought this was the right move — not only at the time, but I was very confident that long term it was the right move relative to the world that we were going to be occupying.”
Rutgers found its competitive footing in the conference, winning championships in women’s soccer, field hockey and, most recently, men’s soccer. While it still hasn’t completely cashed in on the promised pot of gold, the new TV deal is expected to add about $75 million a year to Rutgers’ athletic coffers — an infusion that could help a department that has hemorrhaged cash since joining the conference finally get in the black.
The Scarlet Knights have a spot inside the velvet ropes that even some of the big-time college sports brands are said to covet at a time of great unrest and upheaval. New generations of high school athletes know little about how they ended up here.
They are in the Big Ten, and that’s all that matters.
“I knew one thing: Rutgers is a different place. In order to get everyone in the boat rowing in the same direction, it had to be something that had a pure positive impact across the entire institution forever,” Pernetti said. “There was only one conference that could do that.”
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Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com.
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