Before they stumbled in the West Virginia semifinal game, C. Vivian Stringer thought her women's basketball team had the easiest road to a Big East Tournament title they could have asked for.
But the road to the Final Four they have fantasized about probably couldn't be any harder.
With the excitement level soaring over the first annual "Selection Monday" event - yes, Selection Monday - between 250 and 300 Rutgers fans packed into the Multipurpose Room of the Busch Campus Center over spring break, while ESPN cameras were on hand to witness RU get dropped into what is hands-down the toughest regional in the tournament.
The Knights - who fell three spots in The Associated Press poll to No. 9 last week - were placed in the Cleveland region and started things off last night in Trenton. The regional includes the top overall seed in North Carolina and a No. 2-seeded Tennessee team that many feel got shafted worse than the Knights.
The Cleveland lot also includes Purdue and Pac-10 champion UCLA.
I wish The Daily Targum had published last week over spring break because there was so much to discuss. But while I had qualms with a lot of what happened last Monday at selection time - I would have given all the ACC powers a No. 1 seed, as well as Tennessee - it was refreshing to know Rutgers at least has its head on straight.
Stringer was visibly disgruntled with the committee and their placement, but proclaimed that she enjoys challenges and joked that she wanted to get out of the party so she could go change her clothes and "get ready."
The players were in good spirits in the interview room, most of them saying they didn't necessarily need to be put in Trenton because they were ready to play anyone, anywhere.
And senior All-American Cappie Pondexter, perhaps the most impatient of anyone on the team and rightly so, said, in an inflated understatement, that she was just glad to be among the field of 64 at all, with a chance to rectify her decision to come back to play this season.
It's a fair assessment to say the NCAA selection committee has bullied Stringer-led Rutgers teams over the past decade, even the past five years.
In 2003, the Knights, as the four-seed, fell to No. 5 Georgia on the Bulldogs' home floor. A year later, RU was shipped to Tennessee to take on a 10th-seeded UT-Chattanooga team that upset seventh-seeded Rutgers.
Last year, the Knights had to hush the boo-birds of Connecticut while taking on former UConn standout Jennifer Rizzotti's Hartford squad in the first round - at Storrs of all places. They didn't lose and they weren't playing UConn, but they may as well have been.
Given the opportunity to start out 20 miles down Route 1 from the campus - well within reach for students, families and fans - one may say Rutgers was finally given the treatment it deserves this year.
Until you take a look at the rest of their chunk of the bracket.
Barring another upset of epic proportions, the Scarlet Knights should knock off the winner of last night's Texas A&M-Texas Christian game to plow forward to Cleveland. There, they can likely expect a rematch of last season's Elite Eight match-up with Pat Summitt's Lady Vols in the Sweet Sixteen, and if they live beyond that, an Elite Eight match-up with a deep and dangerous UNC team with ACC flavor unbeknownst to them.
As a second seed, Connecticut was put in the Bridgeport region with No. 1 seed Duke and No. 3 seed Georgia, while in the San Antonio region the big guns were LSU and Oklahoma.
In Albuquerque is Ohio State, Maryland and Baylor, in that order.
Immersed in the most unrelenting of them all, there certainly wasn't much love for a team that battled through the regular season with an unblemished Big East record, because it is that one glaring loss to WVU two weeks ago for which they seem to have been mercilessly punished.
Stringer said last Monday night she thinks the national champion is going to come from their quadrant of the bracket. Enter the underdogs.
The Scarlet Knights have thrived as the little guy, when they are pinned David, the tortoise or whichever metaphor you so choose.
And maybe, just maybe, the slap in the face of being a three-seed has lit a fire under the team that swears it has forgotten all about having its pride stripped away in the Big East tourney, hoping to use the familiar Trenton locale as a springboard into Ohio and then Beantown.
After all, as Stringer, Pondexter, Courtney Locke and surely everyone else has said, if you want to be the best you've got to eventually beat the best.
Better now than later, I guess.
Be the first to comment on this article!