Inside Purdue basketball's quest to fix what may not be broken

Late at night, when he can’t sleep, Fletcher Loyer’s mind sometimes drifts to a dark place.

The Purdue guard flashes back to the Boilermakers’ most recent March implosion, the first-round loss to 16th-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson that the national media deemed a “Chernobyl-level meltdown” and “the NCAA tournament’s biggest upset ever.”

It’s not the Boilermakers’ hail of careless turnovers and wayward 3-pointers that haunts Loyer, nor is it the scathing criticism that head coach Matt Painter and his team endured afterward. What sticks with Loyer most is the memory of Purdue’s somber, tear-stained postgame locker room after a 29-win season abruptly crashed to a halt.

“I remember sitting there in shock, like damn, it’s really all over,” Loyer told Yahoo Sports. “You think about the accomplishments your team had throughout the year, the amount of work you put in. You look around at your teammates, the seniors who put in four years. That was the best team they’ve had and we couldn’t get it done for them.”

How Purdue responds to that ghastly loss is one of college basketball's most intriguing storylines as a new season tips off Monday night. The Boilermakers already had a painful history of falling short in March even before they became only the second No. 1 seed to suffer a first-round upset since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

In 2021, Purdue lost in the first round to 13th-seeded North Texas in nearby Indianapolis. In 2022, Purdue lost in the Sweet 16 to Saint Peters, extending the 15th-seeded Peacocks’ improbable run. Then came the FDU debacle that Painter admitted at last month’s Big Ten media day will bother him “forever.”

“I wish it didn't,” Painter said, “but I think that's part of being competitive. I think that's part of coaching. Like, you don't sit around and shine your trophies. You sit around and wonder why in the hell you couldn't beat somebody 17 years ago on a cold Wednesday night.”

When Purdue opens its season against Samford on Monday night, the preseason No. 3 Boilermakers will have their four leading scorers and all but two rotation players back from last year’s team. Among those is dominant center Zach Edey, who is favored to become the first player to earn back-to-back Wooden Awards since Ralph Sampson.

With a deep, talented core of returning players but a history of NCAA tournament underachievement to overcome, Painter and his staff have grappled with a key question for months: How do you fix what may not be broken? Is there a tweak for a program that annually cruises along from November until conference tournament time, only to veer into a ditch when the spotlight shines the brightest?

Purdue's meltdown

Take away Purdue’s recent history of NCAA tournament flameouts, and Painter is presiding over what might be the most successful period in program history. The Boilermakers claimed at least a share of three Big Ten regular season titles since 2017, came within a last-gasp jumper of making the 2019 Final Four and rose to No. 1 in the AP Top 25 both of the past two seasons.

Last season, in particular, Purdue raised hopes that it was poised to end its 43-year Final Four drought. A Boilermakers team that entered the season unranked overwhelmed the likes of Duke, Gonzaga and Marquette in non-league play and then swept the Big Ten regular season and tournament titles to land the program’s first NCAA tournament No. 1 seed since 1996.

Though Purdue spent seven weeks atop the AP Top 25 last season, there were warning signs that the Boilermakers were sputtering to the finish line. The freshman backcourt of Loyer and Braden Smith showed signs of fatigue and waning confidence, shooting a combined 26.8% from behind the arc after February 1 while also struggling when facing full-court pressure.

“I’m not making excuses, but we definitely had freshman legs,” Smith told Yahoo Sports.

Strained calf muscles in both Loyer’s legs contributed to him hitting what he describes as the “freshman wall” down the stretch.

“I’d always thought that can’t happen to me, but it definitely did toward the end of the year,” Loyer said. “I was going to practice like, ‘Man, I’ve just gotta get through this.’”

Those issues made Purdue a trendy NCAA tournament upset pick, but no one expected it to happen in the first round.

Most advanced metrics ranked FDU 300th or worse entering March Madness. The Knights didn't even win the regular season or conference tournament titles in college basketball's lowest-rated conference. Merrimack swept both but was ineligible for the NCAA tournament while in the final year of a transition from Division II to Division I.

Somehow, none of that mattered once the game began. The shortest team in all of D-I college basketball played big and Purdue shrunk from the moment.

On offense, FDU tried to turn its quickness into a strength by spreading the floor, attacking the basket and forcing the 7-foot-4 Edey to leave the paint and defend in space. On defense, FDU masked its lack of size by crowding Edey with multiple defenders in an effort to force someone besides college basketball’s national player of the year to beat them.

Edey scored 21 points and grabbed 15 rebounds, but he attempted only one shot in the game’s final 12 minutes. His supporting cast struggled to force-feed him passes, to sink the wide-open jumpers that FDU was daring them to take or to generate any easy layups. Purdue shot 5-for-26 from 3-point range. Smith committed seven of the Boilermakers’ 16 turnovers.

In his postgame news conference Painter admitted that Purdue was “outplayed” and “outcoached” and that “it stinks.” He lamented that the Boilermakers had been a top-five seed for six straight seasons yet don’t have a Final Four appearance to show for it.

“You just try to fight to get in the best position possible,” Painter said. “And now we get in the best position possible and this happens. Obviously it hurts. It hurts bad.”

Assessing what went wrong

The morning after, Purdue’s four-hour bus ride from Columbus, Ohio, to West Lafayette, Indiana, was virtually silent. Painter encouraged his returning players to “sit with” the loss, to soak it in, to “learn how to live in misery.”

When they returned home, Painter and his staff assessed everything about their program, from what had made Purdue so successful in the regular season, to any common threads among the Boilermakers’ recent NCAA tournament flameouts. What they decided, assistant coach Paul Lusk said, was that they “didn’t have to scrap everything.”

“Maybe you make a couple minor tweaks, but overall we are who we are,” Lusk said. “And who we are is a very successful program that just needs to have a better run in March.”

One of Painter’s tweaks was to get a little bit more dynamic, to sprinkle in another guard or two who can lock down opposing perimeter scorers and make plays off the dribble when opponents double-team Edey and outside shots aren’t falling. Promising incoming freshman Myles Colvin will eventually help. Early in the season, however, the impact newcomer may be Southern Illinois transfer Lance Jones, a defensive specialist and secondary ball handler.

“He gives us another piece,” Lusk said. “He has the ability to make a shot, he’s confident and he can break down a defense off the dribble. So far this preseason he has done a good job of being another guy besides Braden who you can put the ball in his hands.”

The other tweak Painter has made is to explore ways to get his team to peak in March, rather than at midseason. Purdue wants its key players to be more mentally and physically fresh when the NCAA tournament arrives.

For Smith and Loyer, that has meant anything from increased sleep, to better nutrition, to more stretching and ice baths before and after workouts. Anything to keep them from wearing down too quickly again.

Purdue also may try to play its stars fewer minutes and utilize its depth more.

“In March, you have to play high-level basketball and be ready to go,” Lusk said. “The seed really doesn’t matter that much. Not that you’re ever going to pace yourself during the regular season, but you have to be conscious of putting yourself in position to play your best basketball at the end of the season.”

The only other team that knows what Purdue felt like last March is the Virginia team that lost to 16th-seeded UMBC in the opening round of the 2018 NCAA tournament. Those Cavaliers came back and reshaped their legacy, going from embarrassment to exhilaration by capturing the 2019 national title.

Shortly after Purdue’s loss to FDU, Virginia coach Tony Bennett reached out to Painter to offer him some encouragement and welcome him to the club. Former Virginia star Kyle Guy also sent texts to a few of Purdue’s top returners, including Loyer and Smith.

Guy’s message, said Loyer, was to let that loss fuel Purdue’s offseason preparation.

“I think everyone in our locker room has done that,” Loyer said. “We all feel strongly coming into the season that we’re one of the best teams in the country and we’re going to prove that.”