New Jersey bracketology: Could the state be shut out of the NCAA Tournament?

Answer: Yes, quite possibly. Read on to find out who is the state’s best hope.

It was March 2015, an unusually warm month. “Uptown Funk” reigned supreme atop the Billboard charts, Donald Trump was three months away from launching his first presidential campaign and I was still an undergrad. I remember just getting into KenPom for the first time, camping out with my laptop at the school library for an hour or two, poring over data that would surely let me fill out the world’s first perfect bracket.

This, believe it or not, was the last time that New Jersey was not represented in the NCAA Tournament.

Seton Hall broke a decade-long drought in 2016, winning the Big East tournament and triggering a stretch of four straight NCAA bids. FDU and Princeton were sprinkled in here and there, Rutgers got good right before the pandemic and made the 2021 dance, and New Jersey mid-majors went on a bananas run right after that – Saint Peter’s to the Elite Eight, FDU toppling Purdue, Princeton to the Sweet 16.

Then you have the 2024 tourney, where we can all agree that Seton Hall was worthy of inclusion but robbed by bid thieves and a committee too focused on its handful of blowout losses. Saint Peter’s won the MAAC, keeping New Jersey’s NCAA streak alive, but this was nowhere near the Peacocks team of 2022 and didn’t stand a chance against No. 2 seed Tennessee.

You get the sense that everything’s been trending downward. Now it’s getting late early – 47 days till Selection Sunday – and there’s no obvious candidate from New Jersey’s eight D1 programs that will carry the torch.

So my New Jersey bracketology updates will look different. Last year, I graded my confidence on a scale of 1-10 that Rutgers/Seton Hall/Princeton would make the tournament; I see no need to do that this year when the power teams are in such rough shape and Princeton isn’t 24-3. After today, Seton Hall will only be included with respect to its push for a better seed at Madison Square Garden, because the NCAA Tournament dream was quashed by the end of November.

Enough preamble. I want to go read Eamonn Brennan’s first “Bubble Watch” of the season. Read this, and then follow me over there to read that.

Rutgers

NET: 82; KenPom: 82; Strength of Record: 86

Quad 1: 1-8; Quad 2: 3-0; Quad 3: 0-2; Quad 4: 6-0

I just learned that the website TeamRankings.com puts out bracketology odds, among the many other stats it helpfully tracks in college basketball and elsewhere across the sports world. I don’t know how they get to where they’re going – they claim to run “thousands of computer simulations of the college basketball season” every day without going deeper into the methodology – but the site gives Rutgers a 4% chance to make the tournament and a 0% chance of getting an auto bid. In other words, no chance Rutgers wins the Big Ten title, but 4% that it plays its way onto the bubble.

I found that unusually high, so I consulted BartTorvik.com’s TourneyCast page, where Rutgers is given a 0.1% probability of an at-large. Cue up the “So you’re saying there’s a chance?” gifs.

The biggest problem with Rutgers’ resume is there’s no erasing the Quad 3 losses to Kennesaw State and Princeton. They’d need the Tigers to crack the top 100 of the NET to move that neutral-court loss to Q2, but Princeton stands at 130 right now and has only Ivy League opponents the rest of the way.

The Scarlet Knights’ next four games are Quad 1 opportunities, but how many of those are winnable given the way they’ve been playing? After a game at Maryland on Super Bowl Sunday (I’m tuning in for Ace Bailey vs. Derik Queen if nothing else), the schedule gets far weaker, with only three Q1 opportunities in the final seven contests (at Oregon, at Michigan, at Purdue).

Steve Pikiell has been talking up the opportunities Rutgers still has in front of it, both in his postgame presser Saturday and on his podcast/vodcast series with Jerry Recco. I guess there’s not much else he can do when his team started 3-6 in the Big Ten. The at-large hope, whether it’s at 4%, 0.1% or something in between, could be extinguished at any moment.

Seton Hall