Francis’ last-second shot ends Rutgers dry spell, offers potential to get back on track

Tariq Francis is mobbed by teammates after game-winning three in final seconds to steal victory from Penn. (Photo by Rutgers Athletics)

PISCATAWAY, N.J. — Rutgers still has one more non-conference game and another 18 in Big Ten play, but for the moment, its season may have been altered on a Bryce Dortch rebound.

Dortch, an oft-forgotten member of last season’s star-studded recruiting class headlined by Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, was able to corral a missed free throw by Penn’s TJ Power with six seconds remaining in regulation and Rutgers trailing by one. The sophomore dished to Tariq Francis, who had carried the Scarlet Knights on his back Saturday, and still had one more clutch moment up his sleeve.

Racing up the floor with the clock his adversary, Francis saw the situation on the fly, saving two seconds to step into a right arc three several feet behind the line. With a clear lane, the junior launched, splashing the last of his career-high 34 points through the net with six-tenths of a second remaining, completing a comeback that seemed improbable just several minutes prior.

“(Dortch) flipped it to me and once I got it, I knew the time,” Francis said as he recounted his heroics in Rutgers’ 70-69 win over Penn. “I saw four seconds, but I saw they were kind of loaded up, so I took a comfortable shot and it felt good. It’s a shot that I practice, so just to see it come into the game, it felt good.”

The shot capped off a 180-degree turn for Francis, who was demoted from the starting lineup after last week’s loss to Seton Hall. On Saturday, he and fellow guard Jamichael Davis played within themselves, only turning the ball over once between them as Penn was unable to hold a seven-point lead over the final 2:24 of regulation, missing six of its last nine free throws.

“What a response from the other day,” head coach Steve Pikiell said of Francis. “I’m proud of him. We challenged him, he had a good few days of practice too. He and J-Mike, they both really bounced back and played good basketball, and we need them to.”

“I’m proud of our guys. We bounced back and we won the game. If these guys fight like that for the whole game, we’ll continue to get better. And we got better today, we took a big step.”

Rutgers (6-6, 0-2 Big Ten) had not won since Thanksgiving afternoon, when it defeated UNLV in the final game of the Players Era Festival. A stretch of six losses in seven games, beginning with a deflating loss to Central Connecticut, negated any goodwill that still lingered from the Scarlet Knights’ 4-0 start.

Francis has navigated similar waters, notably during his freshman season at NJIT. The Highlanders had lost seven of eight before his 31 points stunned America East powerhouse Vermont. Two days later, he led NJIT to victory against the second-best team in the league that season, UMass Lowell. The familiarity with adversity has helped him remind a young team that its best ally is itself and one another, a message he reiterated Saturday.

“I think that it’s big for us just in the matter of just sticking together,” he said of the potential galvanizing effect of the win. “At times, with us being a little young and not having some of the experience that other teams may have, I feel like moments like this are big for us to just stick together and just keep learning from every game. We’re all we’ve got. We gotta keep our heads focused and just stay down.”

“Sometimes throughout the season, you have your ups and downs, but through it all, our main message has just been to stay together. We go to battle every day with each other in practice, so win, lose or draw, we always stay together and we always just try to celebrate everything we could do together.”

Rutgers has been maligned for its performance through the first two months of the season, and while it is fair to criticize Pikiell to some extent for the program’s results since missing the NCAA Tournament in 2023, the Scarlet Knights have not entirely folded. An uphill and arduous road still remains after next week’s non-league finale against Delaware State, but for one night, for one moment, the beleaguered State University of New Jersey can savor the positive taste of a ball finally bouncing its way.

“We’ve come off the toughest stretch we’ve ever played since I’ve been here,” Pikiell said. “We’ve played iron, and iron on the road, iron at neutral sites. We’ve played a lot of really, really good teams, and we scheduled Penn because we thought they’d have a chance to win the Ivy League. It’s just really important coming off the stretch we had, and they’ve been working hard. They got rewarded for it today and our locker room was awesome. It was a great way to send them off for Christmas, and we gotta get back to work as soon as we can, and continue to get better. For 40 minutes, it wasn’t going our way, and we figured out a way to win.”