Is Division 1 Basketball a No Win Scenario for New Jersey Tech?
As March turns to college hoops madness, one public college in my home state, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), achieved basketball notoriety by setting an NCAA record of 29 losses against no wins. A team without a conference, NJIT has played Division 1 men´s and women´s basketball for the past two years. NJIT and Rutgers are the only New Jersey public colleges that play Division 1 sports. I cannot understand why NJIT made the leap to Division 1. It is the third smallest public four-year college in the Garden State after Ramapo and Rutgers-Camden. With only 5,400 undergraduates and a largely commuter student body, as well as the science/technology focus of the school, its hard to see how NJIT could develop a fan base that could sustain a Division 1 basketball program. NJIT is located in Newark, which has some excellent high school basketball teams, as well as the state-of-the-art 18,500 seat Prudential Center that opened this fall. However, the Prudential has commitments to Se
