FINAL FOUR
over Clemson in the Elite Eight.
“Guys bought in – we can make this run, other teams have done it,” Oats said. “We have the capability to do it.”
The first national semifinal on Saturday will be big – as in more than 14 feet and 575 pounds of men in the paint.
Purdue has college basketball’s most unstoppable force in Edey.
At 7-4, he didn’t need a ladder to cut down the nets in Detroit and has the skill to go with his size. Edey was the AP national player of the year last year and the front-runner to become the first player to repeat since Virginia’s Ralph Sampson earned it three straight years from 1980-83.
Edey has been nearly unguardable in the NCAA Tournament, becoming the first player since Kareem Abdul-jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) in 1968 to have at least 50 points and 35 rebounds while shooting 65% from the field the first two games of an NCAA Tournament.
Edey topped that with a career-high 40 points and 16 rebounds in a 72-66 win over Tennessee that sent the Boilermakers to the Final Four a year after making history by losing to a No. 16 seed.
“Zach’s got a competitive fight to him. He doesn’t back down,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “When you have that elite physical size and you have that competitive spirit with it, with some skill, it’s pretty dangerous. He’s pretty hard to handle.”
So is N.C. State’s DJ Burns Jr.
The 6-9, 275-pounder has a big-sized game and a personality to go with it. He’s the focal point of the Wolfpack offense and opponents have yet to find a way to stop him.
Burns has great footwork, a soft touch and vision to find the open man nearly every time. Combined with the team’s other DJ, Arizona State transfer DJ Horne, N.C. State won five games in five days just to get into the NCAA Tournament and kept rolling into the Final Four as a No. 11 seed.
“DJ Burns has been around for a long time, but his personality, his play has really opened eyes of a lot of folks around the country,” N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts said.
Now the Wolfpack get to play in the game’s biggest spotlight with two other teams who ended long droughts – and a fourth vying for a place in history.