Column: No second-half push will help Rutgers change its tournament destiny

Slow starts, in two senses of the term, have done Rutgers’ NCAA Tournament hopes in.

PISCATAWAY – There are flashes, these brief, wondrous moments in time, when this Rutgers team resembles the teams of recent years, the teams that went toe to toe with Houston in the NCAA Round of 32 or felled (literal) giants like Purdue.

Maybe the Scarlet Knights get a 3-pointer to fall – a rare sight this season – and suddenly force a bad-pass turnover at the other end. The opponents have to regroup. The RAC is hopping.

We saw those flashes throughout the second half of Sunday’s battle with No. 2 Purdue, when the Scarlet Knights outscored the Boilermakers 40-35. The rebounding troubles of December and early January are no more – Rutgers outrebounded Zach Edey and Purdue by day’s end, including 15-6 on the offensive glass. Rutgers won the turnover battle by five. The stuff to make an optimistic case is all there.

Yet for a team that has become accustomed to defeating Purdue and sending a message to the Big Ten, a 68-60 loss on a rainy Sunday afternoon is not good enough. Rutgers needed a win in the worst way, because it didn’t get a win the prior week at Illinois, or the week before that at Michigan State.

Tough as it might be to hear, time has run out. This might turn out to be a very good NIT team, but it is not an NCAA Tournament team.

I don’t like to get into the business of hot-takery, and declaring a team’s season over before February might feel like it broaches that region of the broader sports media landscape. But look around at every national bracketology column. Rutgers hasn’t been in the discussion all season. It’s now 10-9 overall and 2-6 in the Big Ten. Even with 12 games to go, how do you salvage that?