Maryland Joins Big Ten; Rutgers Is Likely to Follow

Maryland made the latest move in the tectonic plate-shifting that has been college conference realignment by accepting an invitation Monday to join the Big Ten. Rutgers is expected to follow suit Tuesday.

With those moves, the Big Ten will number 14. The Big East will absorb another blow by losing Rutgers, and the Atlantic Coast Conference will lose one of its founding members with the departure of Maryland. The A.C.C. was so worried about losing ground in the conference shuffling that it recently raised the fee for members' leaving the conference to $50 million from $20 million, a payment Maryland is obligated to make to exit.

"The membership of the Big Ten enables us to guarantee the financial sustainability of Maryland athletics for a long, long, long time," Wallace D. Loh, Maryland's president, said at a news conference.

Loh characterized Maryland's athletic department as living paycheck to paycheck and acknowledged that the financial windfall of joining the Big Ten — the conference has its own sports television network and several huge television markets from which to draw revenue — was more than enough to persuade the Terrapins to leave the conference they have called home since it was formed in 1953.

Maryland's athletic department has been in a terrible budget crunch in recent years and borrowed money from the university's general fund last year. It announced this year that it was eliminating seven sports, including men's and women's swimming and men's cross-country. "The director and I are absolutely committed to begin the process to reinstate some of the teams we had to terminate," Loh said.

Maryland's athletic director, Kevin Anderson, did not specify which sports would return. "For me, the most important thing today is that no future Maryland athletic director will ever have to look in young men and young women's eyes and say that you can't compete anymore, that you can't wear the colors for this school," Anderson said. Maryland made its announcement at a news conference Monday in College Park. Its board of regents approved the move in a meeting Monday morning. The university's chancellor, William E. Kirwan, told The Washington Post that the board voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move.

Rutgers, according to The Star-Ledger, will announce its move to the Big Ten at a news conference Tuesday. It will be joining an exodus from the Big East, whose exit fee is $10 million. In recent years, Syracuse and Pittsburgh announced plans to leave for the A.C.C., and West Virginia is already in the Big 12. The Big East has tried to fill the void with a patchwork of teams from far-flung conferences, including Boise State and Memphis.

Rutgers was reportedly hoping to negotiate the rule of having to wait 27 months to compete in a new conference so it could join the Big Ten by 2014. Syracuse, Pittsburgh and West Virginia were successful in that negotiation, and Maryland is expected to request that the A.C.C. lower its exit fee.

The realignment process has been like a set of dominoes that continue to topple across the country. In response to Maryland's departure, the A.C.C. is expected to try to lure one of the Big East's founding members, Connecticut.

A.C.C. Commissioner John Swofford issued a statement that read: "Our best wishes are extended to all of the people associated with the University of Maryland. Since our inception, they have been an outstanding member of our conference, and we are sorry to see them exit."

The Big Ten, which had until recently maintained that it was content to stay with its 12 teams, appeared to be responding to Notre Dame's recent decision to join the A.C.C. in all sports except football.

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