Express Thoughts From Winning Weekend

GoldandBlack.com’s Express Thoughts from the Weekend column runs every Monday morning, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind. In this week’s edition, Purdue’s national championship potential and more.

ONLY ONE THING LEFT TO DO

Reaching the Final Four was a seminal moment in Purdue’s basketball history. It was overdue. The program has been too good, too strong and too consistent to come so close so often, but never break through. Unless we’re talking about elbows or ligaments breaking.

But the reality is this: Purdue did it, but Purdue can do more. Don’t move the goal posts on “success” now, because this Boilermaker team just immortalized itself, but there is more meat on the bone here and Zach Edey and Co.’s bellies are still rumbling

There’s no reason Purdue can’t win the national title.

Take North Carolina State lightly at your own peril. Nine straight opponents probably have. This is one of those weird March stories that makes NCAA Tournament success such a flawed metric. Kevin Keatts was basically fired after a four-game losing streak to end the regular season, then pulled a Sharon Versyp by winning his conference tournament just as the moving trucks were pulling up. Now they’re in the Final Four when they were a fluke entry to the tournament in the first place.

But Purdue’s going to be the decided favorite in that game.

Purdue and Connecticut are on a collision course.

I know the Huskies loom over the tournament like the Death Star, but it does bleed, and Purdue is really, really good (when it doesn’t turn the ball over) and I’d view that more as a toss-up game than anything.

And if Purdue has ever wanted to be perceived as a legitimate underdog, this would be its chance.

That’s been the fascinating dynamic of this season: That Purdue is better than almost every other team in college basketball, but has also had this weird underdog label assigned to it because fools wrote them off because of the result of one basketball played a year ago.

Purdue can beat UConn. Purdue has shown this season it can beat anyone. Doesn’t always mean it will, but it can.

And if Alabama somehow beats Connecticut, then Purdue can wear its De Facto SEC Championship T-shirts to the game.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

Here’s the cheat code, folks: Build a great team, get a 1 seed, then just take a dive against the 16. It’ll suck for like a month, but then …

Virginia and Purdue have nothing to do with another, but both have overcome that very indignity, picked themselves up and done something special the following year. The difference: Virginia had an unbelievable run of good luck to win its national title; Purdue hasn’t needed any during its run to the Final Four. (Houston got the Purdue treatment this year.)

Here’s a crazy thought. Just hear me out.

Is it possible that those UVA and Purdue teams didn’t actually choke, soil themselves, whatever imagery you want to use?

Or is it possible that winning NCAA Tournament games is actually hard and sometimes you just lose, even in games that look like mismatches on paper?

It is not a coincidence that a 16 never beat a 1 for generations, then it happened twice in just a matter of years.

Underdogs are more emboldened than ever, pressure has mounted on favorites more than ever and college basketball coaches continue to inexplicably let jump-shooters go under-recruited at a time when the three-pointer looms largest. Transfer culture is dispersing talent more evenly than it’s ever been spread around. It’s going to happen again, then again, then again.

And in some cases, it’ll be good for the losers.

This Purdue season was forged by the FDU loss, I believe, as I’m sure Virginia’s was to some extent.

Aerosmith said it best.

Everybody’s got their dues in life to pay
I know, nobody knows
Where it comes, and where it goes
I know it’s everybody’s sin
You’ve got to lose to know how to win

ON PURDUE’S WAY

Lost in the bigger picture of Sunday’s events can easily be the fact that Purdue fell behind in the first half by 11 points to one of the best defensive teams in the country.

Didn’t matter.

Exemplifying this team’s intangible survival instinct, its ability to either respond or just kind of hang in there until its inevitability takes hold, Purdue responded with the run that essentially won the game. Tennessee shot over its head for 20 minutes, Dalton Knecht went full superhero and Purdue turned the ball over too much, and yet the Boilermakers led at halftime.

It was very similar to the game at Illinois in that regard, where there were moments Purdue just had to hang in there, and did, enough to eventually take off against a great team.

That’s poise and experience — experience together, most notably, and trust built over time together. These are the sorts of qualities Purdue looks to build while so many others band together new teams every spring. Look what happened to Illinois’ soldiers of fortune — introduced to one another in the summer basically — at the first sign of trouble vs. Connecticut. How can any team be so fragile to give up 30 consecutive points?

Purdue, meanwhile, has had its core together for two full seasons now, a bunch of guys who’ve experienced championships together and probably more importantly shared a locker room and bus ride home immediately after historic failure. The mockery consequently toughened this team up and brought it together in a Boy Named Sue kind of way.

Purdue’s going to keep doing what Purdue does, and Sunday was the ultimate confirmation that it still works and it there’s no reason to think it can’t keep working.

One of the great pitfalls of attaining new levels of success is to think now you suddenly can get a different type of player or now do a certain this or that.

Don’t.

Just keep doing what you’re doing, exactly how you’ve been doing it.