Is Rutgers playing its way onto the tournament bubble?
And other notes from the latest upset in Piscataway.
PISCATAWAY – They don’t give out degrees in bracketology. At least, not yet. It is far from an exact science.
So it’s not surprising when there’s disagreement among the public experts about who’s deserving of a top seed, what constitutes a bubble team and who is on that bubble.
Before Wednesday, Jerry Palm of CBS listed Seton Hall as a bubble team here. That’s funny, I thought – ESPN has the Pirates as a No. 8 seed. The Athletic categorizes them as “should be in,” not “work to do.”
I just want the above framework in place as I broach the topic of Rutgers’ tournament chances.
This team was left for dead by bracket-watchers in November after some bad losses. I personally suspected their season was lost when Illinois ran over them by 35 points in early December. Suddenly, they started winning again.
After Wednesday’s 66-64 upset of No. 16 Ohio State, Rutgers’ second straight win over a Top 25 team and third of the year, I watched as an older man in a Rutgers coat descending from the seats at Jersey Mike’s Arena and shouted gleefully something to the effect of, “We’re on the bubble now.” I wasn’t sure if he was calling down to a friend in the lower section or to the Big Ten Network’s announcing team.
As you look around, ESPN, The Athletic and CBS haven’t put Rutgers back on their radars yet. But Andy Katz, one of the most omnipresent men in college hoops, is now starting to beat the drum for the Scarlet Knights’ tourney hopes. (More on Katz in a bit.)
So let’s talk about it. Does Rutgers have a good chance – really, any chance at all – of reaching March Madness?
Below is Rutgers’ team sheet as of Thursday morning:
Record: 14-9
NET: No. 91
KenPom: 84
Q1: 4-3
Q2: 2-3
Q3: 2-2
Q4: 6-1
Best NET Win: No. 4 (home)
Worst NET loss: No. 321 (home)
(Data comes from Warren Nolan’s indispensable site here. You can also see the updated NET day by day here.)
There is a lot going on here, but to break it down concisely for anyone uninitiated:
NET is the NCAA Evaluation Tool, introduced in 2018-19 to replace RPI as the primary ranking index for men’s and women’s basketball. The algorithm factors in a team value index that aims to reflect when your team has beaten a good opponent, along with winning percentage, weighted (adjusted) win percentage, net efficiency and scoring margin. NET isn’t the only factor to decide which teams receive at-large bids to the tourney, but it’s a sorting tool the committee will use to separate the initial contenders from the pretenders.
Q1 through Q4 stand for the records against teams in Quadrants 1, 2, 3 and 4. That’s defined as follows:
Q1: Your opponent’s NET is ranked 1-30 (Home), 1-50 (Neutral Court), or 1-75 (Away)
Q2: 31-75 (Home), 51-100 (Neutral Court), 76-135 (Away)
Q3: 76-160 (Home), 101-200 (Neutral Court), 136-240 (Away)
Q4: 161-358 (Home), 201-358 (Neutral Court), 241-358 (Away)
Here’s the main problem with Rutgers’ team sheet. That NET number is... not great. It’s too low for most people who follow this stuff to consider putting the Scarlet Knights in the same room as their brackets. Truthfully, a few dozen other teams might get a look before Rutgers if going off NET ranking alone.
It’s so low because of Rutgers’ frustratingly slow start to the year. The home loss to Lafayette has weighed this resume down all season; it’s not just a Quadrant 4 loss to some anonymous mid-major, it’s a loss to a truly poor team (eighth place in the Patriot League). The Q3 losses are to UMass, on a buzzer-beater on the road, and, curiously, to Maryland at home. If you’re thinking of the DePaul loss back in November, that rates as a Q2; Rutgers’ one-point OT defeat to Northwestern last week is currently Q1, as luck would have it.
But in the video of Andy Katz I linked up above, he describes Rutgers as “the most interesting bubble team in the Big Ten.” He isn’t pounding the table to get Rutgers in the field right now... he’s just saying there’s a chance. (Given he made the video for Big Ten Network’s social media, it’s fair to question how devoutly he believes in Rutgers or whether he was asked to pick a Big Ten team to talk about.)
Hours before the Rutgers-Ohio State game, Katz pointed to the opportunities that lay ahead. Seven Q1 games remained on Rutgers’ back-loaded conference schedule. Now, after beating the Buckeyes, the Scarlet Knights have four Q1 wins and six more chances to add to that total.
They will not win all six. Let’s just say that right now. But could they win three or four? The way Rutgers is playing now, especially at home, it is no longer out of the question.
As for that pesky NET number – the more quality wins Rutgers adds, the better it will get. Rutgers went from 111 to 100 when it beat Michigan State and improved from 99 to 91 by beating Ohio State. Granted, it needs to get better by some 25 more spots to really start shaking things up, but as Katz says in his tweet, it is doable.
Rutgers has seven games remaining: four away, three at home. Suppose they continue this crazy momentum they’ve built at Jersey Mike’s Arena and upset Illinois, upset Wisconsin and beat Penn State. Even that might not actually be enough. They’ll need to bottle that up and take it on the road at least once, to beat either Wisconsin, Purdue, Michigan or Indiana, none of which will be easy.
I should note that NET does not factor in when a game was played; a game in November counts the same as one in February. But committee members can and do take into consideration how a team is playing later in the season, when the pressure is up and the conference schedule makes for a better representation of who you are as a team. (They’re also free to consider other circumstances like player injuries or coach absences.)
I asked Caleb McConnell if this was the right time of year for a team to get hot.
“Oh yeah, most definitely,” McConnell said. “A lot of people doubted us every step of the way, but that’s just how we like it. Ever since I’ve been here we’ve been the underdogs... It’s what we do. We just string together wins, and really that’s what makes us.”
Bottom line: If you’re a fan of this team, hold on tight.
........
Thanks for reading. I know, that was so much about the big picture, not enough about an exciting finish in Piscataway. Let’s quickly clean the glass and get on with our Thursday:
You don’t need me to tell you that Geo Baker dominated the final three minutes of Rutgers’ win. It started when he got Rutgers into the bonus by drawing contact at the rim and making two foul shots. It’s moves like that, the ones that aren’t on the final cut of the highlight reel, that still matter so much when a player like Baker goes into “closer” mode. He had more than one assist to Cliff Omoruyi during the night that freed him up to shoot a perfect 6-for-6, four of them dunks. Baker even managed the final block of the game (Rutgers had nine as a team).
It was Baker’s night, but some praise for Omoruyi is deserved as well. I had my reservations about how he would fare against Big Ten competition, but Wednesday he handled a frontcourt-heavy Ohio State team with grace on both ends of the floor. He’s looked terrific lately. Baker praised Omoruyi for taking his game up a level, watching film and putting in extra hours in the gym before and after practice. “Those are some really good big men over there,” Baker said of the Buckeyes. “He’s really coming into his own. He’s learning, he’s absorbing everything.”
While Rutgers and Ohio State battled down to the wire, Seton Hall and No. 25 Xavier crawled through 42 foul calls before the Pirates closed out a 73-71 win. I’m glad I ended up in Piscataway and not Newark on this particular night. More to the point, Seton Hall has won three in a row despite still not having Bryce Aiken back, Jared Rhoden carried the Pirates (25 points, eight rebounds) and New Jersey went 2-0 against ranked Ohio teams in one night. What a world. I couldn’t follow the Seton Hall game while also covering Rutgers, but it’s clear as day that the 17-4 Pirates advantage on the offensive glass made the difference, as Seton Hall ended up taking 16 more shots than Xavier. (Ike Obiagu himself had six offensive boards, more than the Musketeers as a team.)
A quick note about the Ivy League. Yale beat Harvard Wednesday in a makeup game, finishing the season sweep in the rivalry and dealing Harvard its fifth conference loss. In case anyone was worried about Princeton’s chances of making the Ivy League Tournament, a little magic number math shows that the Tigers will be a lock with just four more wins. It’s too early to declare the four-team field will be Yale, Penn, Princeton and Cornell in some order, but it sure feels like it’s shaping up that way. I’ll be at Jadwin Saturday to see Princeton-Dartmouth, but I’m delaying the next Guarden State till Tuesday to create some breathing room after the Super Bowl (for readers and myself alike). Till then!