Maryland has actually had a successful multi-faceted athletic program as compared to Rutgers that is the definition of overall lack of success.
Lots of people in Maryland care about Maryland athletics. People in NJ care about the Giants, Jets, Yankees, Mets, Knicks and the Philadelphia pro teams in South Jersey.
As I said, I think there will be a lot of fans at games from the various B1G teams at least at first. I see their fans wandering around the Eastern Market on Saturdays wearing hats and sweatshirts from Indiana and Purdue and Wisconsin. But this may not last as many of these Midwestern transplants are here to work in and around the Government, and their sport is politics, not football or basketball, and they can't spell "lacrosse". (Washington has been described as "Hollywood for ugly people". A tour around the Market Market pretty much confirms that.)
I was trying to come up with a simple analogous situation for Maryland going to the B1G. Here's what I have come up with so far.
A father allows the family to spend itself into a financial hole and they are teetering on bankruptcy.
He is fortuitously offered a job in another city that pays him enough money to live on. It is a job he is unlikely to be successful at. But he has to take it because the current financial problem has to be dealt with. He'll deal with his likely inability to compete in this new job in the future, he tells himself.
He doesn't actually want to move to his new location and the wife, family and even their dog really doesn't want to move. They don't want to give up their friends, their schools, their church, their doctors, dentist, etc., etc. Everything besides the financial pressure says they ought to stay.
