Iowa is in the top half of conf in revenue and borderline top 1/3 and you compare them to moochers?
Again, that's idiotic.
Then you say rutgers brings more to the table, time to stop replying to you lmfao! Wow lol
Dude. Can you read?
My post is about television revenue. IIRC, every cable/satellite subscription in the B1G footprint brings $.60/month ($7.20/year) to BTN. New Jersey alone has more than 2.5M cable subscribers. That doesn't even factor in adding television sets in New York City area. By my count, 2.5M subscribers at $7.20 per year adds $18,000,000 to the B1G's coffers. Iowa had, as of 2017, 443,000 cable subscribers. That equates to $3,189,600 to the B1G's coffers.
Is Iowa a better football program than Rutgers? Absolutely. No doubt about it. But that's not the issue.
Why do you think that the Pac 12 wanted Colorado and Utah instead of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State? Why would that Pac 12 only take Oklahoma if it could convince Texas to come along? Money. Population. TV sets/cable/satellite subscriptions.
The B1G is an attractive TV commodity because of many factors and I'll readily concede that history and tradition plays a role. But the B1G generates huge TV revenues because of its vast network. Rutgers has one of the largest alumni networks in the country (certainly top 10). It has at least 250,000 of its alumni living and working in the NJ - many who work in NYC. Adding Rutgers to the conference was a massive cash grab.
Your reliance on revenues generated by the University of Iowa Athletics is off the mark. I've focused solely on revenues that are split equally among the members. You're relying upon a number that includes ticket sales, donor contributions and local media revenues - none of which are shared.
ESPN, Fox and any other television network aren't crawling all over themselves to be able to show games to the approximately 450,000 Iowa television sets. They're salivating over the number of television sets in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Michigan and Ohio. And, make no mistake, Iowa is benefitting massively from what the schools in those areas add to the B1G's coffers.
There's a reason why Iowa State was concerned when the Big 12 was looking like it would implode. It is simply not an attractive "commodity" from a television revenue standpoint - which was the largest driving factor for conference re-alignment. If, for some reason (purely hypothetical), the B1G were to implode, Iowa would be in the same position. Among B1G schools looking for a new conference, Iowa would be close to the bottom of the barrel as far as being an attractive revenue target. With the exception of Nebraska, every other B1G team brings more to a conference's revenue coffers than Iowa does.
Iowa is a small market program in the most powerful athletic conference in the country. For Hawkeye fans, we should be eternally grateful that the B1G follows the NFL model instead of the MLB model. And while it would be wholly incorrect to conclude that Iowa doesn't contribute anything to the B1G's revenue sharing coffers (it most certainly contributes), there can be no mistake that Iowa is riding the coattails of the schools in the larger market populations.