Rewarding season for Purdue players, fans raises standard
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Gene Keady walked down one of the long hallways beneath State Farm Stadium on Monday night on his way to his seat for the national championship game. As one of the security guards smiled and nodded, the 87-year-old former Purdue coach nodded back and said, “Thanks for having us.”
Seven months from now, Purdue will start on another journey to attempt to get back to this point (for those wondering, next year’s Final Four is in San Antonio; Indianapolis in two years). There will be hundreds of stories written, videos recorded and columns written about how next year’s team will be constructed without Zach Edey and what momentum Purdue can take from this first Final Four run in 44 years.
Matt Painter was not thinking about any of that late Monday night, after his Purdue team ran into UConn juggernaut in the national championship game in a 75-60 loss. Painter, like Keady before him, knows how tough it is to get here. Purdue fans filled State Farm Stadium, dwarfing the crowds of UConn and the other Final Four entrants, Alabama and North Carolina State. By Saturday, the Purdue gear at the merchandise tents and stores around State Farm Stadium was sold out.
As the years pass, regardless of what happens next, this will always be the team that managed to break through and make history. They did it with questions all season about last year’s firstround NCAA tournament exit to Fairleigh Dickinson.
“It’s a great run,” Painter said in the hallway Monday night, referencing players like Rick Mount and Joe Barry Carroll and the Purdue basketball family that exists, in large part, because only Keady and Painter have led this program over a 44-year period. “But the other thing is that you always want to keep moving the bar. Part of what we had to sit in was true. But it’s always raising expectations for your program. Winning a Big Ten championship, graduating your players, advancing and getting to the final game. All those things you’ll look back and reflect on and feel good about. But it’s the relationships.
It’s the guys. We have great guys, a great staff. It’s fun to be around them.”
Every player in the Purdue locker room, after the game and every day since arriving in Glendale for the Final Four, spoke of the maturity up and down the roster. The Boilermakers might be built around Edey but have found pieces that fit. Players willing to take their turn and fit roles. The added weight of Fairleigh Dickinson loss, as Painter said, was the “piano on your back” that carried through the season.
“The amount of respect I have for the guys in this room,” said a disappointed Fletcher Loyer on Monday night when asked what he will take from this season. “If people out here would have gone through what we went through, put so much work into something, and fail and then to come back and do it again and make it all the way to the national championship … it’s so impressive. A task that many people would fail
MICHAEL CHOW/THE REPUBLIC at. Probably the ones that talk on our name and drag us down are the ones saying that wouldn’t be able to do what we did.”
The reward is in the journey, Loyer said. It was easy to look before Monday night’s game at State Farm Stadium and understand what it meant for Purdue to arrive at this stage.
“What we accomplished is easy to overlook now because we just lost,” Loyer said. “But we changed a lot of lives, we got a community around us and we made people happy. We were happy.”
Loyer spoke of Edey’s unselfishness as the two-time national player of the year as a key to Purdue’s chemistry and success. A little moment at the end of Monday’s game when Edey was taken out of the game put that on display. Though Edey walked off the court for the final time in a Purdue uniform, he was talking about next season.
“He just said that we’re going to be special,” Loyer said of Edey’s message. “I don’t know why he’s talking about next year when what we did the last two years is very impressive. And I won’t ever forget it.”
Neither will the Purdue faithful who have filled Mackey Arena over the years, supporting one of the most consistent programs in the country that could never quite get over the hump in the NCAA tournament. This one might not have come home with the national championship, but the first Final Four since 1980 and first national championship game appearance since 1969 is something that will never be forgotten or taken granted.
“I appreciate everything they did,” Painter said of the Purdue fans. “I’ve always been of the mantra, ‘We’ve got to give them something to cheer about.’ We have a part. I have to get my team prepared. Our guys have to go out there and compete and play. If you do that, they show up. They’ve proven that. We sell out exhibition games.”
Does it raise the standard? The expectations? Sure. But this model of consistency Purdue has built through high school player development and sprinkling a transfer or two (Lance Jones) figures to be the mode of operation moving forward.
“The landscape is changing,” Painter said. “Where does that go? Where are the guardrails in that world? We’ve been able to keep doing it the same way. It will be interesting if we can still keep doing it the same way. I would think we can. We have major support at our place so that is not going be an issue. But we’re not going to get away from the education and the people and growing and developing guys. I hope I don’t have to do that.”
What will it look like in six months? Painter said he wants to find out who is going to work and get better and then determine what it looks like going into next season. There is a group of players in the locker room who know how hard it is to get there.
“It’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve done in your life,” Loyer said of the message to the incoming players. “It’s also going to be most rewarding thing.”
Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649 .