I actually think they're less of an issue now in the Power 2, FOX/CBS/NBC/Peacock days. FOX execs do not care about your schools research dollars.
I actually think this is the UNL admin using this as a cudgel to get some of his academic initiatives supported. He's intentionally playing up the "Big Ten could move on from us" thing. Which is basically a lie.
I mean MAYBE there's some sort of effort in the B1G admins to get some schools to up their (academic) game. But they just let in Oregon, and they're dead last in several of the key academic categories so I kind of doubt that. If this was a big deal they wouldn't have let Oregon in. Oregon's worse than NU in almost every key academic factor that they supposedly value: research dollars, admission rate, test scores. Their endowment is lower than ours too.