Rutgers Basketball, Bending Toward Justice
I have dreaded this day for a very long time. From the moment I hit publish on an article entitled “Rutgers basketball reaches postmodernity” in January 2016, I knew this day would come. Even as I continued to mock Rutgers sports in subsequent posts, I knew that, someday, all of this would come back to haunt me.
Rutgers fans are surprisingly unfazed by my constant trolling of their entire sports existence. If I had written an article saying “Ohio State basketball is a catastrophe”, you can bet that I’d still be receiving angry emails. However, Rutgers fans have remained quiet. They don’t go online and screech OLDTAKESEXPOSED! They don’t gloat over Northwestern’s 6-15 record. They have much more important things to worry about, like making the NCAA Tournament.
When I wrote the original Rutgers article, the Scarlet Knights were in the midst of their worst season ever. In the final year of head coach Eddie Jordan’s tenure, Rutgers went 7-25 and finished an astonishing 279th in KenPom. It was one of the worst seasons by a major conference basketball team in recent memory. There was significant concern that Rutgers would not win a conference game, but they managed to defeat a Minnesota team playing three scholarship players in the final game of the season, thus getting them out of the dreaded 300+ territory of KenPom.
After this season, Rutgers hired Stony Brook’s Steve Pikiell, which was easily the best decision for Rutgers men’s basketball in over 20 years. Pikiell is just a good coach, folks. After leading Stony Brook to a dominant run in the America East, he has brought the same defensive intensity and grit to Rutgers, of all places. For a downtrodden program that could not be further into the ground, Pikiell has taken them to No. 28 in KenPom. Unheralded players like Akwasi Yeboah, Ron Harper, and Geo Baker are playing out of their minds. The Scarlet Knights are sixth in defensive efficiency. Sixth!
Meanwhile, it is Northwestern that is in jeopardy of going 7-25 and finishing with one Big Ten win. It was all too easy to make fun of Rutgers from the pedestal of decency. Now, after the high of 2017, Northwestern is terrible, everyone knows they’re terrible, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, least of all multi-millionaire Chris Collins.
Once upon a time, I wrote this.
“In true postmodern form, Northwestern defies reason. This is a basketball team that takes reason and blocks it off the backboard and into the stands. Northwestern is so bad in Big Ten play that it can only be judged relativistically.”
Well, actually, I wrote that about Rutgers. In fact, everything I wrote about Rutgers being “an exercise in absurdity” or whatever dramatic pseudo-philosophic bullshit I thought of as a freshman in college can now be used against Northwestern. That’s karma, I’m convinced of it. Somewhere, the keepers of the universe saw me write an article trashing a team that I don’t even root for, and said: “this guy, oh this fucking guy, we’ll show him.”
As a result, Northwestern is a 10.5-point underdog tonight. KenPom is even less generous, offering the Wildcats just a 14% chance of winning. There’s good chance Northwestern gets run out of the RAC, a reality which was utterly unthinkable four years ago.
Four years ago, I also made fun of Rutgers’ financial situation. At the time, when Rutgers had joined the Big Ten, they were not receiving payouts from the league’s TV deal, thus making each game they played a net negative financially. I suppose it was funny in 2016 to sit atop my private university US News Top 10 education and make fun of a public university’s woes, but it now reads as remarkably tone-deaf.
Once again, the universe has conspired to poke fun at my expense. In recent years, Northwestern has had to cut staff and student jobs due to a $100 million budget deficit, which was almost certainly triggered by a huge round of spending on athletic facilities. This was done in a Kafka-esque series of mass firings and at least one instance of a 25-person student workforce getting fired via press release. Northwestern is apparently getting back onto sound financial footing, just in time for its football and men’s basketball teams to go 3-9 and 6-15, respectively, with just two conference wins between them.
What’s the lesson of this story? Trying to point at a specific part of an industry or society to call it meaningless or absurd is a fool’s errand. For every laudatory thing I said about Rutgers men’s basketball, you can point to an equally horrendous point about Rutgers football. There is no victory in wryly calling something postmodern or absurd when the entire world is blanketed in suffering and ignorance. This fact is something that original existentialists, Kierkegaard, Camus, et al, recognized immediately. I didn’t figure that out when I was a freshman in college. Now, I know.
In this day and age, where we can willfully ignore record-high temperatures in Antarctica and have a significant part of the population believing in the anti-vax movement or QAnon, every single person on this planet lives in an enormous glass mansion. It’s only a matter of time until Steve Pikiell starts chucking basketballs at your window.
