Your information's out of date, Grumps; you must have lived in the Mid-Atlantic sometime before about 10 years ago. (Insert caveats here), Maryland (#62) is between The Ohio State (#54) and Iowa (#71) in USNWR rankings, just to pick a couple of random Big Ten schools. Nebraska (#99) is the lowest I could find in the Big Ten... the other Big Ten schools were so skeptical of its prospects that it almost wasn't invited to aforementioned CIC
If I remember correctly, it's why Missouri didn't make the Big10 cut.
That was a significant factor against Mizzou.