Congratulations, Maryland, you are dead

If you are a card-carrying member of the Maryland Is Awful club, you might understandably be interested in whether or not the Terps are forced to pay the $50+ million exit fee from the ACC that they are theoretically on the hook for. I am a charter member of that club and would like all the moneys, but you know what, we need to keep tabs on the larger, vastly more important picture here: Maryland is in the Big Ten. Maryland is dead.

There is no easier way than joining the Big Ten to stab your football program to death. Maryland didn't have much of a pulse to begin with, but now it's all but over and there is nothing left to sell. The vast majority of blue-chip football talent is cultivated in the southeast or California, and Maryland's no-man's-land existence, ultimately untenable in any context, is entirely toast.

Expanding to the east coast could damn well benefit the Big Ten's old guard, which is a suggestion that's possibly true but largely irrelevant. Big Ten expansion happened only to make Ohio State and Michigan feel better about themselves, but they will inevitably die in a quicksand of insecurity, much like their respective football programs did more than a decade ago.

The Terps have invited into their territory programs that might otherwise never bother with or gain any traction in the DMV, and they've removed themselves from the Georgia-Florida conversation.

In no sane universe would anybody familiar with football recruiting do this. The Terps are now directly competing with James Franklin, who is equal parts crooked and insane, a combination Randy Edsall can't possibly handle. This is going to end so poorly for Maryland; this is a great day.

Maryland is dead. So, so dead. The Terps can keep the $52 million. I'm going to send Jim Delany a card.