Friday Night Musings: Notes and Thoughts from the Final Four

GLENDALE, Ariz. — A few thoughts and notes from Friday at the Final Four, the day before Purdue meets North Carolina State in the national semifinal.

• It is telling to see Purdue’s players and whole staff in attendance for Edey’s awards presentations. These guys don’t have a ton of discretionary time around the stadium and there are video games to play in that locker room before it opens to the media.

It really shows the bond between Purdue’s superstar and his teammates. That’s not always the case. There can be walls sometimes between the best guy and his teammates. There is no wall with Edey. Insofar as he can be, he’s one of the guys, because he genuinely is, and it’s one of the best things in sports for a team when the best player works and plays the hardest, as Edey does. That’s a huge part of the connection with Braden Smith that has made the two of tem so

• It’s wild to see these football-stadium set-ups for the most important games of the season. This is totay warped from a game-conditions perspective. The shooting backgrounds are different, the elevated court is different, the sensory elements are very different. Obviously, it applies to everyone evenly. In theory, at least; et’s see how three-pointer-dependent Alabama fares as the jump-shootiest team here.

Think about this for a second.

Some of these players here might go on to play in an NBA Finals, an NBA All-Star Game or a gold-medal game a the Olympics and this is still the only time in their lives they’ll played in an environment like this, in front of a crowd like, 70,000-plus-people. This is the ony such platform in basketball and it’s occupied by teams that have 19-year-olds playing for them.

Pretty crazy to think about.

• There are going to be a ton of Purdue people in Glendale. This is obviously a momentous occasion for one of the more basketball-crazed support bases in college basketball, but also another refletion that while Purdue may not have national fan base, it does have a fan base spread nationally, with lots of coastal-state and big-city alums with money. You see it every November at whatever MTE Purdue plays in. They turn out in Hawaii. They go to Atlantis. When Purdue plays at the Mohegan Sun, all the NYC, Boston and Philly people who don’t get to Mackey Arena ever, they show up.

Purdue’s going to have more fans here than anyone, even Connecticut.

Doesn’t guarantee Purdue anything and it won’t quite be the absurd takeovers you saw in Indy and Detroit, but it will be a modest advantage.

• This whole experience should be a victory lap for assistant coach Brandon Brantley, who’s Purdue through and through and has wanted this sort of thing as much as anyone. That he’s so closely associated with Zach Edey‘s historic career, there’s no such thing as too much credit he can get.

Purdue’s very fortunate to have him and have incredible consistency and loyalty in its coaching staff.

During Matt Painter’s tenure at Purdue, one assistant coach has left to be an assistant elsewhere, and those were very different times at Purdue. Coaches have come to Purdue specifically to become head coaches. That’s the sort of reputation Painter has in this marketplace.

• Along those lines, this platform is really going to mainstream Painter as one of the important voices in college basketball. He long has been but only now really gets the biggest megaphone in the sport. Thing about Painter is that he’s a beyond-reproach advocate for college basketball at all levels and brings tremendous wisdom, perspective and common sense to the conversations about the many complicated issues facing his sport.

People don’t realize how much time and thought Painter gives to bettering college basketball and ought to be one of its most prominent voices.

• Interesting to see Edey being positioned to speak out against federal law. NIL is the hottest of topics and as you know, international players can’t profit domestically from NIL without U.S. work visas. There are no exemptions pertaining to cases like Edey’s; maybe if the NCAA had any good will with feds or had won a court case ever, it would be different. But changing the law would open all sorts of cans of worms related to immigration, which isn’t a polarizing topic at all in America.

Edey said more than once today in his various press dealings he hopes the law is changed for those who come after him.

Make no mistake here: Edey has done OK for himself, but did lose out on a ton of money due to the law.

As someone said prior to the season, if Edey were American, he’d be right there with Caitlyn Clark in those State Farm commercials.