Rutgers basketball: The Indiana insult that won't go away

On Saturday, when the unbeaten and 10^th-ranked Indiana basketball team comes rolling into Rutgers for the Big Ten Conference opener (4 p.m., Big Ten Network), much will be made of the Scarlet Knights’ five straight wins over the traditional power. But to fully grasp the agony this streak has inflicted in the land of the candy-striped pants, you should know the story of Kyle Swick.

In 2015, Swick was a law student moonlighting as a blogger about Indiana University sports. An alum and native of the state, he wrote a preview for a football game against Rutgers that included a couple of jabs at the Big Ten interlopers from New Jersey.  

“I wake up the next morning and there’s 120 comments,” Swick recalled. “Rutgers fans had found it and they were furious. They were as mad as I’d ever seen a fan base. People cared about Rutgers football to an extent that I had no idea. From that point on, as a young and immature crowd, we were like, ‘We’re going to antagonize these guys every chance we get.’”

That reached an apex on March 10, 2019. After Indiana crushed the Scarlet Knights 89-73 on the court, Swick typed the following paragraph into his “three things” analysis of the contest for the SB Nation blog CrimsonQuarry.com:

“RUTGER: They don’t belong in the Big Ten. They suck big chungus. While they’ve improved this year (and it would be almost impossible to be any worse), the next conference commissioner should make it their number one priority to fire them into the stratosphere.”

The post seemed like run-of-the-mill trolling to Swick at the time.

Turns out, it took on a life of its own.

Rutgers has beaten Indiana like a drum on the hardwood since then, elevating Swick’s post to the realm of infamy among Rutgers faithful. Last March, after Ron Harper Jr.’s late 3-pointer sank the Hoosiers at Assembly Hall, his teammate Geo Baker mocked the post on Twitter. Rutgers rubbed more salt into the wound this fall, registering its lone Big Ten football win against the Hoosiers and beating the proud men’s soccer program in that sport’s conference tournament final.

Every time, Swick hears it from Rutgers fans.

“Sure enough, the morning after the soccer game some guy with a first name and nine digits following it is in my mentions saying, ‘What do you think about Rutgers dominating Indiana in every single sport?’ I don’t have much of a retort at the moment.”

He added, “I do wonder, how old am I going to be before IU can lose to Rutgers and I won’t have someone chirping at me?”

'Holy cow, this is nuts'

After Swick, now a 34-year-old attorney and father of two who stopped blogging in 2019, received a reporter’s interview request on the subject, he shared it with his old Crimson Quarry friends, who urged him to play the heel to the maximum extent.

“I’m not that guy anymore,” he said. “I’ve mostly hung up my trolling cleats at this point.”

Turns out he’s an engaging, thoughtful, deeply knowledgeable fan who yes, respects what Rutgers basketball has become under Steve Pikiell. But the average Hoosier of his generation, he said, remains unsettled by the continual Big Ten expansion beyond the league’s traditional midwestern footprint.

More than anything, that was the catalyst for his prodding of Rutgers.

“I was just as mad about Maryland being added,” Swick said. “But when I wrote about how I didn’t want Maryland in the conference, the difference was nobody from Maryland cared.”

Rutgers fans really cared.

“I had a Rutgers fan tweet me a picture of my house at one point,” Swick said.  I was like, ‘Holy cow, this is nuts.’”

As the hardwood losing streak unspooled Indiana fans became increasingly irked, to the point where Rutgers became public enemy No. 2, behind only in-state rival Purdue.

“Indiana fans can only evaluate teams historically,” Swick explained. “We have a very hard time as a fan base being able to take a snapshot saying, ‘This is where the teams are right now.’ It’s, ‘Indiana good program, Rutgers bad program,’ regardless.”

The difference between hating Rutgers and hating Purdue, Swick said, is that there’s daily comingling between Hoosiers and Boilermakers in real life.

“With Purdue, there’s only so much unvarnished hate you can spew,” he said. “With New Jersey and just the internet, we can take the gloves off and go for it. Honestly, I don’t know a single Rutgers fan here in central Indiana.”

So the trolling reached firehose-flow level. Swick said Crimson Quarry’s style guide actually directs writers to drop the S when referring to Rutgers. Thus the ultimate indignity – intentionally misspelling the college's name. Even now, when Swick types Rutgers into his phone, it autocorrects to Rutger.

“The reason we kept doing it was it infuriated people,” Swick said. “It became, ‘We’ll give you your S back when you earn it.’ Well, we ended up eating our words on that one because the basketball beatdown started. Did they earn their S now? No. That’s the secret – you’ll never earn it.”

Nerves for Saturday's showdown

Picked in the preseason as the Big Ten favorite, this Indiana team has turned a corner under second-year head coach Mike Woodson. The Hoosiers (7-0) sport experience, balance and an All-America candidate in senior forward Trayce Jackson-Davis (19.2 ppg, 8.2 rpg), who spoke earlier this week about how he’s never beaten Rutgers.

The Scarlet Knights (5-2) don’t own a quality win yet, having lost to Temple and Miami with point guard Paul Mulcahy sidelined by a shoulder injury.

“I have a ton of confidence in this team,” Swick said of Indiana. “But there are nerves, going to a school that has your number. And it’s tailor-made for a letdown spot.”

The Hoosiers won a much-hyped home game against North Carolina Wednesday, and as Baker has said in podcasts this season, Rutgers won’t be intimidated by the name on the front of their jerseys.

“Why would they be afraid of us?” Swick said. “Why would they have any respect for Indiana basketball when we were a doormat for them for their whole careers? Thank God (Baker and Harper) are both gone. It felt like they were there forever. They were talented basketball players and it tormented me immensely.”

Last March, after Harper sank his dagger in Bloomington, the mild-mannered senior turned to the Indiana student section, which had heckled him relentlessly, and gestured to his crotch.

More than a few Indiana fans clutched their pearls. Not Swick. He said he defended Harper’s gesture in conversation with friends.

After all, that’s the same spirit that fueled his “Rutger” taunts.

“Would I do it again? Absolutely, even if I knew what was coming – you’ve got these five straight beatdowns, you’re going to be tormented by this for the next three years of your life,” he said. “That to me is what’s fun about sports – maybe not so much pictures of my home being DMd to me, but there’s a place for trash talk.”

You might even say this retired troll truly appreciates how the Scarlet Knights have punched back.

“I hope we get to a point where, in the next four years, we have a player who owns Rutgers like that and can stick it to their student section,” Swick said. “That kind of passion – that’s what college sports is all about.”

Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. He is an Associated Press Top 25 voter. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.