This has been a rough 2019-2020 college basketball season for Wisconsin fans. Part of this rough season has been marked by the absence of Micah Potter — for rubbish reasons not grounded in fairness; thanks, NCAA! — but part of this uneven journey for the Badgers was the product of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. They’re not bad this season! That’s progress.
Before a team can become good, it needs to take the first step of ceasing to be lousy. Rutgers seems to be there. The Scarlet Knights aren’t a finished product. They will have to prove themselves in the cauldron of Big Ten basketball’s cutthroat competition. However, they aren’t a bad team anymore. They socked Seton Hall in non-conference play, and they once again flummoxed Wisconsin in New Jersey. It has been tough for the Badgers to win away from home in Piscataway. Rutgers has been able to protect its home court against UW.
It is one of those annoying realities for Wisconsin fans: Rutgers rarely amounts to anything over the course of the season, but the Scarlet Knights perk up and foil the Badgers when playing UW at home. It would feel better for Wisconsin fans if Rutgers could actually become a good program. Losses wouldn’t sting as much in that case.
This leads us to the obvious challenge facing Rutgers in the 2020s: Make an NCAA Tournament. It has been 29 years since the Scarlet Knights last did so, in 1991 under current TV commentator Bob Wenzel. Rutgers lived a very different existence then, as a member of the Atlantic 10 Conference. The move to the Big Ten has been bad for Rutgers in football, but basketball hasn’t been any better, at least not until now. However, RU coach Steve Pikiell shows signs of lifting the program’s floor. Now, the question becomes, “Can Pikiell raise the Scarlet Knights’ ceiling?”
Pikiell, from this outsider’s perspective, seems to be going about his building plan the right way. Rutgers relies on defense and rebounding to win. That’s how Rutgers beat Wisconsin. Pikiell understands that since recruiting high-end talent will be hard as long as Rutgers doesn’t have an NCAA Tournament bid to proudly tout on the trail, his current teams need to win with effort and hustle. Effort will travel. Effort can hide a lot of limitations. Effort enables a team to win with defense when the offense is struggling. If Rutgers can lean on its defense enough to make an NCAA Tournament in the next few years, the Scarlet Knights can make that national and regional splash. They would then be in position to improve their recruiting and land high-end scorers which could catapult the program to the next level.
Jon Rothstein (you know him; everyone does) is fond of saying, “Steve Pikiell. Pounding Nails.” Rutgers will try to hammer home an NCAA berth in the 2020s and see if that opens the floodgates to a new era of prosperity in New Jersey.