Mike Rosario and his former team are working on different timelines. Rosario and the No. 10 Florida Gators are built to win now. Despite their 85-83 double-overtime loss at Rutgers Thursday, Florida still has the potential to make a deep postseason run this year. With Kenny Boynton, Bradley Beal, Erving Walker and Rosario, the Gators have arguably the best backcourt in the country. Rutgers, meantime, hopes it’s built to win down the road. With his own backcourt group of Eli Carter, Myles Mack and Jerome Seagears, Rutgers coach Mike Rice believes he has the foundation of something special going forward. “Hopefully this is [what is] to come,” Rice said in describing the play of his freshmen, who combined to shoot 23-of-44 and score 58 points, led by Carter’s game- and career-high 31. Sure, Rutgers wants more nights this year like it had Thursday when it scored just the eighth victory over a Top 10 team in program history. But mostly this team is built to really accomplish something next year — when athletic big man Wally Judge becomes available after transferring from Kansas State — and in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. By then, Big East behemoths Syracuse, Pittsburgh and West Virginia figure to finally be gone from the league. Rosario would be a senior at Rutgers now had he chosen to stay in Piscataway. Perhaps he would be mentoring Carter, Mack and Seagears while helping Rutgers transition into a new era. He certainly showed good sportsmanship by visiting the Rutgers lockerroom and congratulating his former teammates after the game. But Rosario needed to leave Piscataway for his own reasons. Rosario needed to move on and so did the school after former coach Fred Hill was bought out by Rutgers following a profanity-laced tirade at a school baseball game. He needed to get to a program that made him work and away from a coach who let him do basically whatever he wanted. For a guy who won a mythical national championship at St. Anthony under Bob Hurley in 2008, Rosario needed to get to a place where he could win now. Rutgers moved on by hiring Rice, a tireless and passionate coach who believes Rutgers now has the best set of guards it’s had in a very long time. Are those guards and this team built to win now, the way Florida is? No, but they are set up to win consistently going forward, and if that happens, perhaps both Rosario and his former school will get what they want.
