All in Basketball
Our expectations were pretty positive and pretty fair...and we were disappointed a few weeks ago. If you accept the ending of the season as 'okay', you're part of the problem that Purdue athletics are mired in. The days of a class that expected to go to the Sweet 16 each year seems like ancient history.
The Boilers are one of a select few teams to be ranked all season long. A nice accomplishment, but now on to the postseason. (Which Aneesh doesn't care about.)
The Boilers beat their second top ten opponent in Mackey this month. And there was joy again in Mudville.
Boilerdowd opines on Purdue's odd current situation -- a healthy overall record, a ranked team, some good wins....yet in the bottom half of the conference in terms of conference seeding.
Disaster was averted this evening as The Forces of Good continued the trend of not dropping two straight games.
This might sound absolutely crazy, but sometimes I feel like our fan base can overreact when things don't go Purdue's way. Just a little...
During the Christmas/New Year's week, the BSCR held pretty steady as human polls didn't move our Boiler and computers didn't move them much either.
For years we've felt it to be our duty here to point out sports media inconsistencies, specifically when it involved our Boilers. But as a good pal of mine reminded me a few years ago- "Why would anyone respect Purdue in the media?" It's a fair question.
The refs were atrocious. Iowa players are still holding AJ. Mike Gesell falls down when his cat bumps him. The refs stole a timeout. Adam Woodbury moves on all his screens. When Morgan Burke stepped on the floor at halftime, you could see the gloom spreading from his footprints like the Grinch stealing joy from Whoville. Someone stole Painter's car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. OK, now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what really cost Purdue this game.
Courtesy of the dead time between now and January 1, I bring to you Irrational Optimism.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bo Ryan is no longer the head coach at Wisconsin...and it shows.
The honorable B. Dowd pointed out that I can actually post longer thoughts here - in fact, it's how I got the job in the first place, by request from you, the readers - and threatened me with death by square donut* if I do not do so immediately. Here then is my Journey Into Mackey, from the drive up to the drive home.
It looked like the Boilers were flat-out hungover in the wake of the disappointment in Indianapolis on Saturday night as Purdue simply couldn't score early on. In fact, at the 15:30 mark, Purdue had just two points...in the Butler game, Purdue had 12. But it's not how you start, it's how you finish, and the Forces of Good did that quite well tonight.
Not much is consistent in life- But I always know that I'm extremely handsome, I gotta pay my taxes, Santa comes each year and Purdue loses in my home city.
You knew they weren’t going undefeated. You knew they were going to lose eventually. And you probably “hoped” it would be against a good opponent, rather than the kind of mindfreeze we’ve seen early in the last few seasons.
What's it all mean? It means Purdue is good. At 11-0, they're only the 7th Purdue team in the history of the program to start this fast...and to start all games with a margin of 12+ points in each game, this early season run is unprecedented for the program. But it's about to get a bit tougher.
It should be no surprise that Purdue extended it’s unblemished record to 11 wins with a 95-64 victory over the ferocious Penguins of Youngstown State.
As though Purdue wasn’t already going to be the favorite tonight, Howard was playing their fifth game in ten days and had endless injuries.
