New Jersey bracketology, Part II: A Rutgers reality check

Every game Rutgers played between New Year’s Day and Super Bowl Sunday now sits in Quad 1. The result: four wins, seven defeats.

I committed a pretty serious faux pas two weeks ago when I wrote my first New Jersey bracketology of the season. I forgot to cite my sources.

Though I did toss in some links to the domains of Ken Pomeroy and Bart Torvik, respectively, the egregious omission I feel bad about is WarrenNolan.com.

This website is one of my most frequently visited from January through March. The design and color coding are so straightforward and useful for journalists and fans alike to read a school’s team sheet and understand where its tournament hopes stand.

WarrenNolan also delivers the goods on women’s basketball data, and if you’re into college baseball and softball, it’s got you covered there too. Any team sheet data I refer to in these bracketology updates is sourced primarily from WarrenNolan and I can’t thank the site (and the man behind it) enough.

It gets you thinking about the math of it all, the never-ending flow of numbers that permeate the tournament selection process. The men’s tournament committee gave Torvik’s T-Rank and Wins Above Bubble official stamps of approval for inclusion on team sheets beginning this year. I said it the other week when writing about the women: More data, and more exacting data, is better for the decision-making process, even though the human-powered committee is bound to make some human errors in judgment each year.

You know whose numbers I don’t really care for at this late stage of the season? Yeah, based on today’s headline, you probably have a guess.

Let’s delve into why:

Rutgers

NET: 69; KenPom: 65; Strength of Record: 72

Quad 1: 4-10; Quad 2: 2-0; Quad 3: 0-2; Quad 4: 6-0

Rutgers’ at-large hopes died on Sunday at approximately 2:20 p.m. in College Park, Md., as the No. 18 Maryland Terrapins finished off a 90-81 win over the Scarlet Knights.

Why was this the final straw for me? A road game against a top-20 opponent that’s now 14-1 at home? Rutgers shouldn’t have been expected to win anyway, right? Least of all without Ace Bailey fully healthy.

It comes down to the schedule and the vanishingly few strengths of Rutgers’ resume.

What the Scarlet Knights have going for them is Quadrant 1 wins. They have four, one of only 35 teams who can make that claim. Of course, it took them 14 tries to get those four wins, but nevertheless.

Every game Rutgers played between New Year’s Day and Super Bowl Sunday now sits in Quad 1. The result: four wins, seven defeats. That may have been good enough if combined with a good nonconference resume, something Rutgers decidedly does not have. Following up the Illinois win with a victory at Maryland at least would have given Rutgers’ at-large case some juice.

But that portion of the schedule is now complete. Only three of Rutgers’ final seven games are Quad 1 opportunities: at Oregon, at Michigan, at Purdue. Oregon and Michigan are definitely gettable, I’ll give you that. But if I were a fan, I’d be far more concerned about stumbling in one of the other four games – Iowa, at Washington, USC, Minnesota.

Every single resume-based and efficiency-based metric on Rutgers’ team sheet sits between 65 and 72. Numbers like those put Rutgers on the periphery of the periphery – not officially dead, depending on which bracketologist you talk to, but far too unlikely. Look at the teams BartTorvik.com considers bubble teams; look at how many have better NETs and Strengths of Record before you get to Rutgers.

If the ask is for the Scarlet Knights to go 7-0 or 6-1 down the stretch, win a game or two in Indy to get to 20 wins, and then hope that six or eight of these teams ahead of them collapse to make room for Rutgers to steal its way into the First Four… sorry, I’m out.

In better news, there’s enough turmoil at the bottom of the league (Penn State, Northwestern, Minnesota and obviously Washington) that Matt Hackman gives Rutgers a 90% chance of making the 15-team Big Ten tournament field. Wednesday’s home game against Iowa (4-8 in the league vs. Rutgers’ 5-8) looms large for seeding reasons.

Seton Hall