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13 things to know about Rutgers, who just might break a 29-year NCAA tournament drought

It’s time to pay attention to dear old Rutgers. Scarlet Knight Fever rages in Piscataway, N.J., and why not, after Tuesday’s 72-61 win over ranked Penn State? They haven’t seen things like this — namely a 12-3 start, and serious, legitimate thoughts about an NCAA tournament bid — in this century. “We’re climbing the ladder,” coach Steve Pikiell said the other day. “We were picked to finish 12th in the league.”

TOPPIN ON TOP: Meet college basketball's best player more fans should know about Let’s start right there, with 13 things to know about Rutgers.

Why picked so low? Well, that’s pretty much been the Rutgers’ zip code. The Scarlet Knights went 16-76 their first five seasons in the Big Ten, finishing 14th and at the bottom four times and 12th last year.

The last Rutgers winning season was in 2006, the year Twitter was born.

The last NCAA Tournament bid was 1991. That’s a longer dry spell than any other team in the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC or American. The last time the Scarlet Knights heard their name called on Selection Sunday, Mike Krzyzewski had not won a single national championship, Roy Williams was in his third season at Kansas and Tom Izzo was a Michigan State assistant. Rutgers was in the Atlantic 10. The school has changed league affiliation three times since then. 

This is the best start since 1975-76. Gerald Ford was U.S. president that year, and Rutgers showed up in the Final Four.

The last time the Scarlet Knights were 3-1 in conference play was 1995.

Pikiell has a history of program building. He took Stony Brook from a 4-24 record to an NCAA tournament bid. He obviously has Rutgers trending up in his fourth season. The Scarlet Knights are no longer easy roadkill, for example. They were 1-35 on the road in the Big Ten their first four seasons in the league, but they’ve won four times in the past 12 months, including a recent 17-pointer at Nebraska. Things have changed. Pikiell understands having to fight for your place. He was the seventh of nine kids.

The Rutgers coaching staff knows a little about leadership. All seven members were team captains in college, and six were point guards. Pikiell played for Jim Calhoun’s first Big East champion at UConn.

“They played tough, they played physical,” Penn State coach Pat Chambers said of the Scarlet Knights. Yeah, you can tell by the numbers that Rutgers deals in muscle and force. The Scarlet Knights are eighth in the nation in rebound margin, 17th in field-goal defense, 17th in scoring defense. Take the Penn State game. So what if Rutgers started 1-for-15 shooting, and made only two of 10 3-point attempts all night? There are other paths to changing a program’s fortune.  

“I think we’re finding our way. I think we’re counting on our defense,” Pikiell said. Included in his team’s handwork this season:

Thrashing Niagara 86-39 — Rutgers’ biggest win over a Division I opponent since 1978 . . . holding Stephen F. Austin — the team that brought down Duke —31.5 points below its average . . . crunching Wisconsin with a 23-5 edge in second-chance points . . . whipping Seton Hall (Pirates star Myles Powell was injured) by 20 . . . blitzing Lafayette with a 17-0 start, which meant the Scarlet Knights opened three consecutive games with a combined run of 40-0 . . . blowing away Nebraska 79-62 with a 48-31 rebounding margin and 52 points in the paint.

PIRATE WATCH: Myles Powell wants you to know that Seton Hall is still a Big East title contender

They have managed to dominate Nebraska and beat Penn State without team leader Geo Baker, who is out with a thumb injury. That’s a promising sign of maturity and development for a team that routinely starts four sophomores. “I think this team can keep growing,” Pikiell said. “I think the best basketball’s ahead of us.”

 This is not entirely a blue-chip operation. According to the Rutgers sports information office. Baker — the second-leading scorer and Big Ten leader in steals — was 414th in recruiting prospect rankings coming out of high school. Myles Johnson, a 6-11 center who is shooting 71.7 percent and averaging nearly 10 points and nine rebounds, was 408th. Johnson is an electrical and computer engineering major who can speak Japanese, played water polo, and was recruited by four Ivy League schools. Forward Akwasi Yeboah didn’t play basketball in England until he was 13, spending his time with soccer and rugby.

Rutgers has been a testament to manufacturing wins with whatever it takes. Not a lot of glitzy offensive numbers, then. Junior Ron Harper Jr. is the top scorer with a 12.4 average. But he does what he must, such as going 12-for-12 from the free-throw line against Penn State. That name might ring a bell. His father was a five-time NBA champion with Chicago and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Rutgers is a box office hit. There were five sellouts last season, the students were waiting outside when the doors opened for the Penn State game, and the Seton Hall contest was the largest crowd in 17 years. The Scarlet Knights haven’t seen such fervor or attention in ages, which is why Pikiell opens most any post-game press conference at home with, “Always appreciate everybody coming.”

 What would David Stern think? The late NBA commissioner was a Rutgers dean’s list alum.

So do we beat the Rutgers drum for March yet? Pikiell offers all manners of caution.

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“We have 16 games left. We were picked 12th in the league. I get that stuff. It’s good to write about, I hope our guys aren’t reading it.”

And . . .

“There’s a lot of season left, but I do appreciate the excitement and enthusiasm people have."       And . . .

“We’ve got to play well, we’ve got to beat really good teams with great coaches, we’ve got to go on the road and win. You’ve got to do a lot of things before you can start talking about anything else.”

Good luck on stopping that talk around Piscataway. It’s been a while.

Mike Lopresti is a member of the US Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, Ball State journalism Hall of Fame and Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. He has covered college basketball for 43 years, including 39 Final Fours. He is so old he covered Bob Knight when he had dark hair and basketball shorts were actually short.The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NCAA or its member institutions.

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5 things you didn't know about the iPad on its 10th anniversary

On January 27, 2010, the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, presented a device to the world that looked a lot like a giant iPhone that didn't make calls. A few months later, the first iPad was made available to the public, more or less kicking off a tablet revolution, the effects of which can still be felt today.

By now, every big name in tech has some me-too product resembling the iPad in its portfolio. Some of which are budget-friendly and accessible, while others are more experimental and eye-catching. Regardless, it's impossible to deny the impact that decade-old Apple announcement had on the tech landscape.

To celebrate, we decided to put together a list of things you may or may not know about the Apple device that helped carve out a previously undefined space between phones and laptops. The iPad has had a fascinating first decade of existence and we thought it might be worth recapping it as we head into the 2020s. 

If at first you don't succeed...

The Newton MessagePad was kinda, sorta an early tablet.

Image: SSPL via Getty Images

While the iPad was a big hit that launched a successful product line, it wasn't Apple's first attempt at a handheld, touch-based computer. That honor belongs to the Newton MessagePad which launched in 1993 at the exorbitant price of $900.

By today's standards, it was more of a personal digital assistant, or PDA, than a tablet. But the MessagePad was a bold step for Apple, a stylus-based portable computer that used handwriting recognition software to translate what users wrote into on-screen text. The only problem is that it didn't work very well. The MessagePad soon became the butt of jokes in popular cartoons like Doonesbury and The Simpsons because of its inability to accurately translate what you'd written into text.

Apple kept producing new MessagePad models until 1998. But, after that, it would be another 12 years before the company revisited the idea. You can read more about the life and death of this odd little device in Wired.

Second time's the charm

The original iPad was pretty limited compared to what we have now.

Image: Ryan Anson / AFP via Getty Images

The original iPad launched in the U.S. in April of 2010, but it was a far cry from the powerful tablets Apple sells now. It started at $499, had a measly 1,024 x 768 resolution, and only offered up to 64GB of internal storage. For comparison, a current-generation iPad Pro model can go up to a 2,732 x 2,048 resolution and allows for up to 1TB of storage.

Features like FaceTime, multitasking, 4K video capture, AirPlay, and plenty of others we take for granted in Apple devices now weren't available at the iPad's launch. In fact, its biggest claims to fame were arguably two-fold: It had the ability to use existing iPhone apps (albeit on a bigger screen) and the iBooks app, an Amazon Kindle rival.

Don't get us wrong, the original iPad was still extremely cool at the time. But when you look at what the line can do now, the OG is rather quaint in comparison. It's kind of like how the first of The Fast and The Furious movies was about stealing DVD players and, now, they're basically superhero movies featuring cars.

The hilarious awkwardness of iPad photography

Not quite as subtle as snapping a photo with an iPhone.

Image: Jens Kalaene / picture alliance via Getty Images

The ascension of the iPad as a popular consumer product also brought about the somewhat hilarious trend of iPad photography. Make no mistake, modern iPads have powerful cameras that can produce incredible photos and videos, much like their smaller brethren, the iPhones. But there's still something a bit funny about seeing someone take a photo with a big tablet.

In fact, iPad photography is so humorously unsubtle that websites like this one have run pieces about how to do it in public without looking like a jerk or making people uncomfortable. Nowadays, it feels like the golden age of iPad photography (if ever there were one) has ended with how powerful iPhone cameras have gotten. But it's a safe bet you probably have at least one memory of someone looking goofy in that regard.

Maybe we should bring back iPad mirror selfies in the new decade. Could be fun.

Not too cool for school

The iPad has been an educational tool in plenty of schools over the years.

Image: Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Corbis via Getty Images

It makes a lot of sense that iPads were popular in schools in the early part of the last decade. They're more portable than desktop computers and today's kids are indisputably more adept at using touchscreens than they are at traditional mouse-and-keyboard setups. Apple tablets and laptops ate up a huge chunk of school device orders in 2013, but a New York Times report showed that, by 2017, they'd effectively been replaced by cheaper alternatives.

Apple has since released a more education-focused iPad model, but the point remains that the trend of iPads in schools rose and fell over the course of just a few years. Whether it was price, accessibility, or some other combination of factors, schools decided the grass was greener over where Google's Chromebooks live. 

Of course, iPads are not totally dead in the educational water. A 2018 feature from The Verge showed that plenty of educators still like what iPads have to offer, but the competition is definitely stiffer than it used to be.

Still king of the hill

The iPad is still the king of the tablet market.

The good news for Apple is that, a decade after its debut, the iPad is still wildly successful. The ubiquitous tablet crossed the 400 million sales mark in 2018, and there's no reason to believe that momentum will stop anytime soon.

To put it in a different way, Strategy Analytics found that more than 26 percent of all tablet shipments in the third quarter of 2019 were iPads. No other brand of tablet had higher than 13.9 percent. The combined power of all Android tablets dwarfed iPad shipments, but no individual product line was more popular than the one that arguably started it all.

After a decade, it's obvious and inarguable that the iPad experiment worked out for Apple. It's still the most recognizable tablet despite the number of competitors and there's something to be said for that. We'll just have to wait and see what the second decade of the iPad brings to the table.