Column update: It got so much uglier
Unlocking Tuesday’s Rutgers column with a new foreword, precipitated by recent events.
PISCATAWAY – Well, here we are again.
For the second time in four days, Rutgers lost at home, but not all losses are created equal. If you have the stomach for it, check out the Twitter replies to Wednesday’s final score, a 61-46 no-show against Penn State, where fans are heckling Rutgers and telling them to drop to Division II. It’s a bit different than Sunday’s 68-60 loss to No. 2 Purdue, when someone wrote, “You guys have that neverending fight in you!”
In summation: Rutgers hosted a Penn State team that both the NET and KenPom considered the worst in the Big Ten, a team that also didn’t have its leading scorer (Kanye Clary, 18.4 ppg), in a building the Scarlet Knights have been very tough to beat in recent history. They proceeded to miss 16 of 17 3-pointers, 11 of 21 layups and half their 22 free throws while giving up 20 turnovers. Only the two freshmen, Gavin Griffiths and Jamichael Davis, scored at least 10 points, while Aundre Hyatt and Mawot Mag were held out most of the second half, with Steve Pikiell saying it had to do with matchups.
Pikiell said he’d look at everything, including lineup combinations and the overall rotation. He said he truly believes he has players who can make shots. Like any observer, he struggled to explain Rutgers’ clear backward step.
“We were a bad rebounding team and then we became a good rebounding team. Tonight we were up plus-8 at halftime and we end up minus,” he said. “The other night we scored 20 points in the first half, we scored 40 in the second half. You know, consistency. That’s something that I really gotta figure out and try to get these guys to just play for 40 minutes. When we do we’ve been good, we’ve shown signs of being really good.”
It all makes the column I wrote Tuesday feel precious. Aw, I really thought I was going out on a limb to say Rutgers wouldn’t make the NCAA Tournament after a close call against Purdue. What felt slightly bold to declare on Jan. 30 is utterly obvious two days later.
Without intending to pile on, I decided the best way forward this morning is to re-post the column I published Tuesday for all to read, including a few footnotes with the benefit of hindsight. (Consider becoming a paid subscriber if you don’t already have access to Tuesday’s editions.)
For the time being, Rutgers will turn its attention to two road games. On Saturday it visits Michigan, the only team with a worse Big Ten record (2-8) than RU, and Tuesday it heads to Maryland.
“One thing you got to do in this league, you got to take a punch and you got to get off the mat and you got to get ready for the next game and we’ll do a good job with that,” Pikiell promised. “Hopefully we’ll make some free throws and make some layups and that will make life a little bit easier for us.”
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 team1, 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?
Brad Wachtel, one of my preferred bracketologists who has a discerning eye toward New Jersey’s teams, wrote the following after Rutgers’ loss to Purdue: “Rutgers drops to 1-9 against Q1 opponents. For fans still holding out hope for a bid… Four Q1 games remain (Wisc, at Purdue, at Wisc, at Neb) and the Scarlet Knights likely need to win all of them for a chance to get back to the NCAA tourney.”
I was honestly surprised to hear that Rutgers even had four Quadrant 1 games left.
See, the Scarlet Knights’ season has been defined in February for the past few years. Two years ago, they went on a two-week tear of four straight wins over ranked opponents to eventually justify a First Four berth. Last year, it was the opposite, a collapse following Mawot Mag’s injury in an otherwise inspiring win over Michigan State on Feb. 4. Quadrant 3 losses piled up, and the committee decided that even with Rutgers’ four Quad 1 wins, they liked Nevada’s body of work better.
Are we due for a pendulum swing back in the other direction, a moment where Rutgers catches fire to force its way onto the bubble? You tell me:
Rutgers’ schedule lightens up significantly in February, which would be a good thing if it had stacked up a few impressive victories by now. Two games against dysfunctional, last-place Michigan? Two games against a Maryland team that shoots about as poorly as Rutgers does? Penn State at home without the potential trap game in Happy Valley? I imagine Rutgers can win at least four of those five games alone.2
But winning those games will not do enough to help Rutgers’ own suboptimal NET number of 993, nor its equally unattractive predictive metrics. And Quad 1 record is weighed heavily in the committee’s decisions for at-large bids.
For a data point, I checked out the Big Ten teams that earned at-large bids to the tournament over the last two years and how many Q1 wins they had on Selection Sunday. Last season, it was an average of 4.86 wins. In 2021-22, when nine Big Ten members made the dance, every single at-large team had at least five Q1 wins, 6.75 on average, because of how damn good the league was in the regular season.
What’s interesting about the present day is the Big Ten is by all measurements having a down year. Everywhere I look, it’s projected to have six NCAA bids. Purdue, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan State are the sure things, Northwestern and Nebraska lead the next tier of aspiring candidates and after that it’s a mess. That relative lack of league strength then hurts Rutgers’ ability to pick up Q1 wins down the stretch.
So I’d argue a slow start to the season put Rutgers in a nearly insurmountable hole. Coincidentally, that’s been the Scarlet Knights’ problem at the game-by-game level, too. Imagine if Rutgers had played the way it did in the second half Sunday for a complete 40 minutes – either against Purdue or, frankly, against any other good team.
Rutgers has lost eight games since the start of December, six in conference plus Wake Forest and Mississippi State. Only two of those games had close first halves. Rutgers trailed by double digits roughly 10 minutes into both Illinois games and against Wake Forest, Iowa and Purdue. Against Ohio State, the Buckeyes pulled away to lead 45-32 at halftime, enough to withstand Rutgers’ late-game rally.4
It takes this Rutgers team too long to get into the flow of a game, particularly on offense. I don’t see the Scarlet Knights heave up a ton of bad shots, by the way.5 Layups and other shots within 5 feet are just consistently off the mark – Rutgers ranks 351st of 362 teams in 2-point shooting percentage, at 43.6%, worse than NJIT and Rider.6
There is still plenty of respect around the Big Ten for Rutgers. Purdue coach Matt Painter emphasized how Rutgers has “been better than us” for a few years.
“We might be better in terms of winning games or being higher in the league or whatever,” Painter said, “but head-to-head matchups they’ve been better than us and I told our guys if you’re not ready for that – and we still look at the rebounds, the turnovers. They were better than us there.”
From the coach’s perspective, while seniors Cliff Omoruyi and Aundre Hyatt are plenty familiar with the wringer of the Big Ten, Rutgers is overall a young team still figuring it out.
“They don’t have the same experience,” he said. “You know, obviously Hyatt and Cliff have some experience, they have some other guys like Mag, those three guys. When you lose Caleb McConnell and (Paul) Mulcahy, those guys were so good defensively, their ability to disrupt. Now these guys here, you’re learning the system on the fly when you deal with the grad transfers.”
Fans will continue to fill up the arena the rest of the season, whether it’s lowly Penn State or No. 6 Wisconsin coming to Piscataway. They’ll be looking for improvement, some sign of a team that may rise to the middle of the Big Ten by March. Again: The stuff to make an optimistic case is all there. It’s just going to be too little, too late to make a meaningful push into the NCAA Tournament discussion.
“Very good” remains to be seen. The NIT isn’t fully out of the question yet, because if Rutgers has, say, a 6-2 February against soft competition it can pass a few teams in the standings, and the NIT’s new rules guarantee the Big Ten and every other power conference will receive at least two bids.
Well there goes one of those opportunities!
It’s dropped to 113 after Wednesday.
Rutgers’ loss to Penn State doesn’t fall into this category. It led at the 10-minute mark and trailed by just two at halftime because, for as badly as the Scarlet Knights played, the Nittany Lions looked even more terrible in the first half.
I absolutely did on Wednesday. Some of those missed layups looked abominable.
Not trying to footnote and update every single number in Tuesday’s story, but by making just 16 of 33 2-point attempts against Penn State, Rutgers actually improved its season percentage to 43.8%. That’s how low it was, and is. The Scarlet Knights have the worst 2-point shooting percentage, the worst effective field goal percentage and the second-worst KenPom adjusted offensive efficiency of any power-conference team this year.
I'm just at a loss with this team. This team was always going to regress after losing Paul and Cam, but this much is ridiculous. 20 Turnovers last night is inexcusable, getting outrebounded can not keep happening, 1 for 17 on threes is abysmal, and 50% FT is unacceptable. Mag looked out of sorts again, just like against Purdue. I hope he doesn't have a nagging injury or anything. I trust Pike and next year is going to be great, but it is still THIS year and they need to figure something out. Go RU!