There's not an ounce of insight there. If you think we needed to have started a campaign "a decade earlier", I'm going to guess that either forgot the marketing of our new football program or that you arrived as a UConn fan sometime later. We had all the campaigns you could shake a stick at - different than whatever you think the Rutgers' marketing plans were, but necessarily so since we were starting from ground zero.
When the second round of ACC expansion started in '11, we were coming off a Fiesta Bowl and our attendance was about 39,000 per game. And we got skipped over. That one is not on us - Syracuse was always going to be the next one picked and Pitt had history and was also coming off of three seasons that were actually stronger than our prior three. Seven years of football doesn't overcome history.
We were never considered for Big Ten expansion. We were only one season removed from the Fiesta Bowl and only one season into the P era when the Big Ten first approached Rutgers - we weren't then what Pasqualoni eventually turned us into. Rutgers was an AAU university in a heavily-populated state that happened to be contiguous to the the Big Ten's footprint.. Our football success relative to theirs was not a matter of any importance - neither was their relative meager athletic success on all fronts. Lots of televisions sets + AAU + Contiguous = Done deal.
As for the last go-around, better football and a track record beat academics. If it happens a year prior when Louisville is coming off a year where they had 32k in the stands, maybe it's different, but I doubt it.
As for your "math aptitude", I'm not terribly sure how it fits in here, but in any event, this is for your refrigerator.