One of the bigger stories in college basketball and the Big Ten in the 21st century, not just the 2010s, is the lack of high-end basketball success in the state of Indiana. The Indiana Hoosiers were a fixture in the NCAA Tournament — often its later rounds — through the early 1990s under Bob Knight. Imagine sitting on your couch in 1993 and having someone tell you that Indiana would make one Final Four in the next 26 years. You would have told that person s/he was absolutely crazy and needed to see a shrink.
Alongside Indiana’s lack of significant basketball success is another improbable story of frustration: Purdue, a program in a basketball-mad state with a rich heritage and tradition (a guy named John Wooden played there in the early 1930s), has been very consistently good but very rarely great. The Boilermakers have somehow managed to go 39 years without a Final Four and do not appear to have the kind of team which is ready to snap that streak before it reaches 40 years this upcoming April.
This past March in Louisville, Virginia’s Kihei Clark (the pass) and Mamadi Diakite (the shot) denied Purdue its first Final Four since 1980. Virginia swiped that Final Four ticket from Matt Painter’s grasp. The Cavaliers’ late play — in one of the best regional finals ever seen, right up there with 1992 Duke-Kentucky — denied Purdue’s Carsen Edwards a deserved victory lap as the hero of heroes in the history of Purdue basketball. Edwards delivered one of the all-time-great performances in NCAA Tournament history, but it didn’t lead to a Final Four.
As one considers the challenge facing Purdue in the 2020s, the surface answer is obvious: Get to the damn Final Four. The more precise detail, though, is this: Have a Plan B. What I mean by that: Purdue’s best team over the past 39 years was the 1994 team with Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson, a college basketball legend. The 2019 team relied so much on Edwards for its production and overall success. Purdue needs a “Plan B” player, a second guy who can team with a superstar to give the Boilermakers the extra measure of dynamism they need to succeed at the highest level. We will see what the 2020s bring for a program which is yearning to snap a decades-long Final Four drought.