DJ White rests up for the Purdue-Indiana showdown.Well, someone said there's a game tonight. Apparently, two schools in a basketball-mad state are meeting this evening in their only matchup of the year. In addition, the coach of one squad may be coaching his last game at that school because of repeated rules violations plus being a general liar when asked about it by his superiors and the governing body of his chosen profession.
The visitors start three freshmen, have won 11 in a row, are 4-0 against top ten teams and are 12-1 in Big Ten play. Each team is numbers 14 and 15 in the two polls -- one is ahead of the other in each. And in the Big Ten itself, they're only separated by a game and a half, although the winner of this game is effectively up by an automatic game the rest of the way because if the two were to end the season with the same conference record, the winner of this game would get the head-to-head tiebreaker.
The home team with the cheating coach is playing its third straight game against the top teams in the Big Ten. Fortuitously for them, each of those three has been at home. Seems perfectly fair to Kelvin Sampson.
Okay, why am I writing this like a Walt Whitman poem? The teams are Purdue and Indiana, two old-time rivals who haven't both been good at the same time in many a moon. Gene Keady and Bob Knight prowled these sidelines for years, and for the twenty years they overlapped in the conference their schools took 11 conference titles. (Incidentally, have you ever noticed that angry, demonstrative coaches "prowl" the sidelines; oddball, eccentric coachs "roam" the sidelines; and structured, controlled, military types "patrol" the sidelines?)
Purdue and IU are back at the top of the Big Ten. And tonight is their only scheduled matchup of the season. I'm sure we'll have more to share in terms of our pregame thoughts later on today. Or maybe we won't. We're not sure we want to acknowledge how badly we here at BS want to see a win tonight. Sure, we're greedy. But Matt Painter and this group of froshes have made us this way.
Boiler Up!