Looking Back and Looking Ahead from the Gates of Hell
Following their receipt of the biggest upset in the history of the Men’s NCAA Tournament at the hands of the 16-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson Knights, CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein offered Purdue Boilermakers fans both empathy and a taste of their new reality.
“Purdue fans: I have compassion, I have sympathy, but these fans have been taken to the gates of Hell”, Rothstein quipped.
This seems, on first notice, to be making far too grave a statement out of an admittedly tough loss. But upon further inspection, it feels like Rothstein hit the nail on the head.
Purdue fans have, in a way seemingly no other fanbase can compete with, seen more than their fair share of tough losses in recent history. It’s been two full seasons since a road loss didn’t result in home fans storming the court. Not to mention a bevy of tournament upsets as well.
In 2017, Purdue, a 5-seed suffered a first round loss at the hands of 12-seed Arkansas-Little Rock. The following year, star big man Isaac Haas suffered an elbow injury that left the Boilermakers outgunned in a Sweet 16 matchup with Texas Tech.
2019 looked, for a few moments, like the breakthrough Purdue have been waiting for since 1980, the last Final Four berth for the proud program. With three seconds left in an Elite Eight matchup with top-seeded Virginia, the ball was up for grabs on Purdue’s side of the court as they clung to a two-point lead. Boilermaker fans have been trying in the years since to forget the rest, but the potential promise did not come to fruition. They followed this result up two years later with a stunning loss to 13-seed North Texas that in looking back now seems almost ordinary for the program.
2022 proved to be a season in which longtime head coach Matt Painter’s team grossly underachieved. With eventual lottery pick Jaden Ivey, stud sophomore Zach Edey, and veterans Trevion Williams, Sasha Stefanovic, and Eric Hunter Jr., the Boilermakers looked poised to exercise 40 years of demons. Instead, they coughed up a winnable Big Ten regular season and lost in Indianapolis in the Big Ten tournament final. When Baylor and Kentucky, the East region’s top two seeds, both exited on the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, a favorable path to the national semifinals was laid out, with a Sweet 16 game against tournament darling St. Peter’s, the 15-seed, upcoming. Somehow, logic again went out the window in favor of one final underachievement.
I provide all this context to illustrate the fact that Purdue and its fans are beyond familiar with these soul-crushing losses. Rock bottom had been reached so many times before this year. Surely, one of these times, the collective luck of Boilers around the country would turn around. And, for the vast majority of this season, 2023 looked like the year that Purdue finally broke through the glass ceiling.
The Boilermakers won 22 of 24 to start the season as Zach Edey, having become one of the most dominant players in the history of college basketball, put together an undeniable case for the National Player of the Year. But a road loss to bitter rival Indiana kicked off a string of 4 losses in 6 games culminating with a home loss to the Hoosiers that clinched bragging rights for the next year in the Hoosier State. Nonetheless, Painter’s team won the conference title by three games and rolled through the Big Ten tournament, clinching the top seed in the East region.
Purdue did not look nearly as formidable in February as they had in November and December, and each loss further showed their fatal flaw — beyond Edey, there was no consistent scoring threat. Freshmen guards Fletcher Loyer and Braden Smith and veteran contributors Mason Gillis, Ethan Morton, Brandon Newman, and Caleb Furst all had moments, but no one could consistently deliver double-digit scoring, and it showed. Purdue struggled to pull away late in games, and often found themselves in danger of squandering leads without the ability to stay on the gas pedal. On Senior Day at Mackey Arena, they took a 21-point lead into halftime against Illinois, and won the game by 5 due to a second half push. In the Big Ten tournament final, the Boilers almost lost all of a 17-point lead in the second half, eventually winning by two over the upstart Penn State Nittany Lions.
But the team, despite not playing to their full potential, was still winning. 29 games is no small feat, and while most had written off the Boilermakers as national title contenders, there was still reason for optimism that the Boilers would go down fighting closer to the end of the Tournament than the start.
Fairleigh Dickinson wasn’t even supposed to be in the Tournament. The Knights won the automatic qualifier out of the NEC on a technicality because Merrimack, the program that won the conference’s postseason tournament, is ineligible as it only recently made the move to Division I.
The Knights’ coach, Tobin Anderson, was a Division II head coach 10 months ago, and brought multiple D-II transfers with him upon accepting the job at FDU. They had to beat Texas Southern in the First Four just to take the floor against Purdue.
Even with Purdue’s concerns offensively, even with their spotty recent form, and even with Purdue’s history of falling short of their capability, there is no way Purdue should lose to Fairleigh Dickinson. Right?
Not only did they do exactly that, the surprise had practically worn off by game’s end. The Boilermakers look tight from the start, and Purdue went into the half down a point, and when a surge never came out of the locker room, it felt over. The 63–58 loss was just the second instance of a 16-seed taking down a 1-seed.
In the span of a few hours, 29 wins, an outright Big Ten title, a Big Ten tournament title, all accolades the far more lauded team of a year prior couldn’t achieve, were erased. The season-long performance of a transcendent college basketball player, the likely National Player of the Year, and one of the finest players to grace Mackey Arena’s halls, an afterthought. And the 2023 Purdue Boilermakers, for the foreseeable future, solidified themselves as the butt of the national joke.
Purdue Basketball is an interesting phenomenon. Despite being rich in tradition; 25 Big Ten Championships, having once been represented by John Wooden and Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson among 40+ All-Americans, and having had just two coaches lead the program since 1980, they’ve nver been able to find national success. The Boilermakers’ most recent Final Four was 1980, the season before Hall of Fame head coach Gene Keady took the helm. When it was time for Keady to hang it up in 2005, he handed the reins to his former point guard, Matt Painter. In the years since, Painter has carried on, relying largely on in-state talent to remain competitive in the conference and around the country.
The last two seasons under Painter have been some of the best in the program’s history. The Boilermakers achieved the number one ranking in the AP poll last season; a last-second loss at Rutgers limited their reign to just one week. This year, they began the season unranked before vaulting into the top 5 after winning the Phil Knight Invitational, throttling perennial powers Duke and Gonzaga along the way.
For the first time in a long time, if not ever, Purdue is finally achieving the national prominence fans are craving. Expectations for the Boilermakers are almost always far higher than they should be, due most likely to the fact that their biggest rival has 5 national titles to their credit, a truth that eats at every Purdue fan. But as great as beating the Hoosiers can be, Final Fours and National Championships are the desires of a starving fanbase.
Which is what makes this loss, coupled with the seismic underachievement of a year ago, all the more painful. For the first time in decades, Final Fours and National Championships are a real possibility more often than not. And while many fans will call for Painter’s ouster, for various members of the team to transfer, the fact remains that Purdue is in the best shape it has ever been in. Painter, approaching his 20th year in charge, is consistently bringing the best players in the state to West Lafayette, and finding the pieces he needs to give the team a chance at the promised land year in and year out.
Next year, high 4-star Myles Colvin could very well be the missing piece should this roster remain in tact otherwise. There are 4- and 5-stars committed and considering Purdue at a higher rate than ever before. And the reputation is changing slowly but surely, though losses to double-digit seeds aren’t going to help that metric.
Matt Painter is not yet 55, and has been at this for almost two decades. Whenever he hangs it up, he will in all likelihood be Purdue’s all-time wins leader and be in the top 5 for the Big Ten. He is one of the best coaches in the country, one of the cleanest coaches in the country, and one of these years his breakthrough will come. It’s all worth noting that there is no one better for Purdue to go out and get to replace him, not they should or even would consider such a move.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t leave you with this: The only other 1-seed to lose in the first round, the 2018 Virginia Cavaliers, also returned much of the same roster, and a year later found themselves cutting down the nets. If this is rock bottom for Purdue, there’s only one direction to climb.
