Last season, the Purdue basketball team was a one seed in the NCAA Tournament, but they were eliminated in their very first game by 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson. The Boilermakers had that on their mind all of this season, and they are now back in the tournament as a one seed yet again. The first weekend was much better for Purdue this time around as they easily cruised through their first two games, and now, they are ready for a date with Gonzaga basketball in the Sweet 16.
It wasn't easy for Purdue basketball to go down so early last season, but those kinds of upsets happen in college basketball. Boilermakers head coach Matt Painter knows that, and he has worked hard to make it so it won't happen again.
“It's a game that doesn't always love you back,” Matt Painter said, according to a tweet from CBS Sports. “But you got to understand that going in, you're going to play a game one team is going to win and one team is going to lose. When you get used to winning a lot, The expectations that you raise and get it, for your program makes it even harder than that. We've been beat up a lot or I've been beat up a lot for the people that have beaten us, we were the higher seed, we should win this and that, and I always say that takes away from your opponent that's not fair to them, they've earned like we didn't get cheated out of anything. Somebody beat us. And so I think, for us, the most important thing to do, and what we've always tried to do, is be honest with ourselves and evaluation, no matter how your season ends, so you can hopefully make those corrections.”
Purdue is ready for this stage
One silver lining for last season's March Madness debacle is that the Boilermakers have seen just about anything and they are prepared for anything. The only other team to lose to a 16 seed in the first round was Virginia, and they went on to win the national title the next season. Perhaps Purdue basketball is heading toward a similar ending.
“We've seen almost every situation possible,” Braden Smith said. “We've been through it and it's happened to us. So I think just after everything that happened last year, and applying to this year, we kind of understand how to handle those situations and obviously it helps me and Fletch [Fletcher Loyer] maturing a little bit and kind of figuring out how things go as time goes on. So I think that helps a lot as well and we just got a lot of guys that enjoy to compete and just enjoy the game of basketball so it makes it fun and easy for us.”
Last year's difficult upset loss was a big motivator for Purdue in the offseason. This team stuck together and they worked hard, and now, they are two wins away from the Final Four.
“Yeah, it's it's been difficult. It's been long season spent a lot of time since last year, we've gotten a lot better,” Fletcher Loyer added. “We've gotten a lot better as people, players and teammates. And I think that everything we've went through with the summer a lot harder workouts, we're pushing each other a lot more and going to Europe together. It was just a lot of different things that we did to kind of stick together and be ready to go come March this season.”
The heart and soul of this Purdue basketball team is their big man, Zach Edey. Their games runs through him, and he believes that his team is prepared for anything.
“We've been through a lot together as a team, like as a unit,” Zach Edey said. “I think when you go through things as a group and as a unit you understand kind of how to deal with them. So there's no situation that we can be put in that we haven't been put in before. There's no style of basketball a team can play that that we haven't played against before. So I think we're really well prepared for everything.”
The Boilermakers will look to get one step close to the Final Four on Friday night as they will take on five seed Gonzaga at 7:39 ET. The game is taking place at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan, and Purdue is favored by 5.5 points.
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