Express Thoughts: Purdue’s win over IU and more

GoldandBlack.com’s Express Thoughts from the Weekend column, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind.

ON THE INDIANA GAME

Purdue was a heavy favorite Friday night against Indiana as the two teams came into the evening on distinctly different trajectories, but the Boilermakers had to fight like hell to win that game, a real credit to IU. I don’t cover the Hoosiers but do have enough operational knowledge there to know that was one of their best performances of the season.

The red wedding Purdue fans might have hoped for never really came close to occurring, and it doesn’t matter. Wins are wins, and Purdue needs wins on top of wins, especially now that Michigan State has bled. The Big Ten race doesn’t start anymore until contenders go west.

But Purdue needed that Indiana game and Indiana played like it needed that game, again, a credit to Indiana, which could have showed up, lost by 20 and surprised no one. The Boilermakers had better set their jaws before that game in Bloomington, because IU should be confident.

Purdue being pushed to its breaking point in a need-to-win setting, and persevering, was another line on the Boilermakers’ impressive recent body of work, even if it came with some really uncomfortable moments along the way.

The loss at Penn State, I thought, was the last vestige of the Super Bowl, Storm The Court Era for Purdue but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t still expect every single opponents’ absolute best every single time out. I’m sure it does, but even then, winning is hard.

It sure was hard against Indiana.

ON BASKETBALL STUFF

Couple weeks back, I spent more time than I’d have preferred writing about Purdue’s schedule getting it beat vs. Ohio State. This weekend, I spent more time than I’d have preferred writing about officiating almost getting it beat.

I hate it, because I know how it comes off: As myopic and apologist-ish, neither of which I am.

But, you know, this stuff should be covered, credibly. Stuff like Purdue getting five straight three-day turnarounds including trips to both coasts, that’s important context. Pointing out how the Big Ten has a referee working games in L.A., West Lafayette and Piscataway on back-to-back-to-back days, someone should be pointing out that out.

Sports results are very much guided by circumstances, by injury, by luck, whatever. The schedule cost Purdue the Ohio State game and the officials’ whistle-hunting sidelining Trey Kaufman-Renn nearly cost Purdue the Indiana game. The officiating already cost Purdue the Texas A&M game, in my opinion. (But I guess it’s totally possible that a team that averages 17.3 fouls in every other game this season committed only 11 that day.)

I hate writing about this stuff only out of concern over perception, not because the stuff isn’t important and there ought to be light shone on it, especially when it comes to accountability for officials and officiating administration.

It’s more than important. It’s often every bit as much a part of the game as the two teams.

ON PURDUE AND INDIANA

Every time Purdue and Indiana play, especially when the series seems tilting away from IU, it’s grounds for think-pieces about one of college basketball’s great rivalries, particularly about Indiana, given the palace intrigue that always seems to follow the state’s foremost attention hound and its constant drama.

My belief: It’s not that big a deal. The game is important to fans, sure, and to Matt Painter and those players he has that are naturally invested in it, but once Indiana started trying to be Kentucky years back and recruiting nationally to appease adidas and the unreasonable standards its fans hold it to, things changed.

Purdue has modernized itself considerably under Matt Painter but this program’s base layer is largely the same — blue-collar and generally pretty humble and modest — as it was when the rivalry became great as Purdue became the resistance of sorts to Bob Knight’s dominance.

Now, IU is a portal-and-NIL ATM and shoe company vehicle caught chasing glories long gone, with its past to appease and a present that expects it all every year, with very little grounds for it. All those kids from New Jersey and Connecticut in that student section, they show up on campus expecting championships from a program that hasn’t done much of that in their lifetimes. That job is one of the sport’s biggest fishbowls and that is not always a plus during hiring processes, unless a coach elsewhere needs to shake his present employer down for a new contract, a la Bruce Pearl.

Every year, Indiana wins the off-season and its following goes nuts, blowing expectations through the roof. Media who gravitate to names like trout to shiny things put it in their top 25 in the preseason and things take off from there, leading into their October party in Assembly Hall. The coach is then set up to fail. The vanity and hype around that program become some of its worst enemies.

Meanwhile, Purdue kind of keeps its head down, tries to do things the right way, stays out of the news, gives coaches a chance and wins with the sort of player and coaching IU used to. Former players still living off their names from their college days don’t run to microphones every time something happens they don’t like.

Yes, Purdue is the better program right now, but these things can be cyclical, and Indiana is about to chop a guy who has won three more games against the Boilermakers than the guy he replaced did. I don’t think Mike Woodson fits modern college basketball very well and I think Indiana has made itself an easy mark in the NIL marketplace by exuding desperation, so this isn’t a defense of Woodson, but at some point, Indiana basketball culture has to give a guy a few years before the students start booing and the fans start spitting battery acid all over social media.

Purdue fans have high expectations, as they should, and its share of nutjobs online, but not nearly the apocalyptic tendencies of its peer to the south, the expectations, hubris and self-importance that chased IU into five-star-or-bust recruiting mode and left them with soft teams, diva teams and, these days, a payroll that lies in stark contrast to its outcomes.

Purdue and Indiana became such a great rivalry in part because the programs were so alike, so rooted In the basketball identity of this state. Today, they’re polar opposites.

The Boilermakers’ more fitting rival right now is Michigan State.