In this crazy, unpredictable, up-is-down, down-is up season, where no team can hold the No. 1 ranking for more than a few minutes, where century-old streaks are destined to die, where all bets are off even against the Stephen F. Austins and Evansvilles of the world, where precedents are shattered and history is made every other night, it’s only fitting that we now contemplate the rising phoenix that is Rutgers basketball.
Rutgers? Yes, Rutgers.
Remarkably, the Scarlet Knights have become a thing in college basketball for the first time in a very long time. They are 12-4 (3-2 Big Ten) and ranked 26th in the NET. They have beaten three top-40 KenPom.com teams (Wisconsin, Seton Hall and Penn State). They have won at Nebraska, which Purdue and Iowa failed to do, and beat Stephen F. Austin at home, which Duke failed to do.
We’ve been speculating about the delicious possibility that DePaul and Penn State could get back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2004 and 2011, respectively. Those schools look like Duke and Kentucky next to Rutgers, which hasn’t been to the dance since 1991, the longest drought of any power-conference team. In fact, Rutgers has only been to the tourney six times in its history and has advanced past the Sweet 16 just once, when it went to the Final Four in 1976. The years since then have been pockmarked by instability, scandal and lots of losing.
Coach Steve Pikiell knew full well the dimensions of this breach when he alighted in Piscataway in 2016 following a successful 11-year run at Stony Brook. He was aware that in the previous eight years Rutgers had been through four athletic directors, three basketball coaches and three conferences. He knew all about the embarrassing scandals, from the firing of Kevin Bannon in 2001 after it was revealed he ordered players to run wind sprints naked in practice to the firing of Mike Rice in 2013 after videotape emerged of him abusing players. That’s not to mention the various contretemps that have engulfed the football program and the rest of the athletic department over the last decade or so.
Now, finally, Rutgers’ long-suffering fans are ready to party like it’s 1991. “I’ve met ’em all,” Pikiell says with a laugh. “They talk about the past a lot. I just tell ’em, I can’t take credit for the Final Four in ’76, and I can’t take blame for the other stuff. I always say you get what you deserve in basketball. If we continue to get better, we’ll deserve to play in the postseason.”
Rutgers has long been touted as a sleeping giant, given that it’s the state university of New Jersey, which regularly churns out high-major prospects. Yet, Pikiell has had to build his roster the hard way, not by out-recruiting his competitors so much as out-evaluating them. When he took the job after leading Stony Brook to the NCAA Tournament, he persuaded then-UConn assistant Karl Hobbs, who had previously spent 10 years as the head coach at George Washington, to leave Kevin Ollie’s staff. Pikiell also hired Brandin Knight, a New Jersey native who was a Big East co-player of the year at Pitt and spent 10 years on the coaching staff there, and along with the third assistant, Steve Hayn, they hit the trail hoping to unearth some hidden gems.
While most power-conference coaches were bird-dogging big-time showcases and sneaker-sponsored tournaments, Pikiell and his staff attended off-site games and regional events such as the Hoop Group camp in New Jersey. According to the recruiting rankings, the results were underwhelming. The team’s leading scorer, 6-6 sophomore Ron Harper Jr., was rated the No. 175 prospect in his class by 247sports.com. Starting point guard Geo Baker, a 6-4 junior, was 414th in his. Third-leading scorer Myles Johnson was 371st. Yet Pikiell and his staff believed in those three as well as the other signees, and they have since worked hard to develop them into Big Ten-caliber players. The result is a roster that evinces a distinctly Jersey attitude. “None of these other Big Ten schools we’re playing recruited us,” Harper says. “So we go out there and play with a certain mentality, to show the world what they missed out on.”
The world is noticing. Though the Scarlet Knights have just two seniors and are ranked 241st on KenPom in experience, they make up for that youth with depth and balance. Nine players are averaging between 11 and 31 minutes, and the team has had seven leading scorers in 16 games. That next-man-up mentality was tested on Jan. 2, when Baker broke his thumb in practice. The following night at Nebraska, he was replaced in the starting lineup by 6-6 sophomore Caleb McConnell, who had 20 points (on 8-of-8 shooting), five rebounds and five assists in a 79-62 win. “If that had happened a year ago, it would have been rough going for us,” Pikiell says. “That’s why I play so many guys, because as a coach you want to prepare them for those kind of moments.”
There will be many more such moments if this trajectory continues. For so long the basketball program was saddled by the wider dysfunction at the university, but the resources for sustained success are now in place. On Sept. 1, Rutgers opened the $117 million RWJBarnabas Health Athletic Performance Center, a practice and sports medicine support facility for the men’s and women’s basketball teams, as well as the wrestling and gymnastics teams. The project had been several years in the making, which allowed Pikiell to sell recruits on his vision of better days. And even in the down times the Scarlet Knights played on a terrific homecourt in the Rutgers Athletic Center, aka “The RAC,” a throwback tinderbox that was opened in 1977 and seats around 8,000. The RAC was packed for the team’s Jan. 7 win over Penn State even though students were still on winter break. If the team enters the middle of a February with a chance to make the NCAA Tournament, it will be one of the best environments in all of college basketball.
That is only a few weeks from now, but for a program with this kind of past, it might as well be four years. The league schedule is going to be a gauntlet, but given the dearth of quality teams in the ACC and the SEC, it is possible the Big Ten could place more than three-quarters of its teams into the NCAA Tournament. (
In last week’s Bracket Watch, our own Brian Bennett had 10 Big Ten teams in the field, with Rutgers projected as a No. 6 seed.) Pikiell likes to remind his players they were picked to finish 12th in the Big Ten during the preseason, but that’s not really necessary. Like the program they joined, these Scarlet Knights have a long history of being doubted and dismissed. They know they have a lot more room to rise.
