Big November college basketball games are often best used as measuring sticks, and perhaps no men’s team in the country had more to prove over the weekend than the Purdue Boilermakers. Matt Painter’s club was the preseason favorite in the Big Ten almost by default, but there was plenty of skepticism about the Boilers’ ability to compete for a return trip to the Final Four with Zach Edey no longer wearing gold and black. Early buy game results had done Purdue no favors, struggling to put away the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Islanders and getting bludgeoned in the paint by the Yale Bulldogs were early potential warning signs. Playing the Alabama Crimson Tide, the No. 2 team in the AP poll with over half of its 10-man rotation on the NBA radar in some form, figured to answer the early question of whether Purdue could hang with the top teams in the sport.
And that answer? A resounding yes.
