Purdue

Live from Washington DC, CHN's Jon Teitel is covering the NCAA Tournament pod featuring Xavier/Georgia, Baylor/Purdue, West Virginia/Arizona, and Belmont/Duke. He'll be checking in periodically with player & coach interviews as well as news updates from the Verizon Center.

 

Purdue

Big Ten

by Joel Welser

 

Last NCAA Appearance: 2007, Second Round loss to Florida

Coach: Matt Painter (1-2 in 2 NCAA appearances)

 

The success of the current freshmen class has been well documented. Between Michael Beasley, Kevin Love, Eric Gordon, Derrick Rose, Jerryd Bayless, Donte Green, and O.J. Mayo, the class boasts plenty of future lottery picks and likely NBA stars. Even the second-tier of players, guys like Jonny Flynn, Kyle Singler and Nick Calathes, have made major impacts, and will likely be suiting up for NBA squads sometime in the near future.

Another day, another Field of 65. As you should know by now, I'm projecting the NCAA Tournament field on a daily basis for the rest of the year (except no Saturday's since there's little action Friday). This is a field based on how the tourney looks "as of this moment." For one-bid leagues, I simply include the conference leader at the time of publishing. In case of ties, I use my projected winner.

 

A companion to our daily Three Stars of the Day, we present the top three Games of the Night.

 

What makes college sports so great is the fans. And who enjoys dressing up like an idiot more than college students? Or was that just me during my college days? My hat goes off to the little fan club of Stanley Pringle of Penn State. The guys wear full body size boxes of Pringles. Not only does it make me want to eat Pringles, but it’s just plain fun. Maybe I just don’t look in the crowd enough to notice or I’m too quick to flip to a different game when they show the crowd shots, but why don’t more

Indiana (8-1)

Purdue (9-1)

Wisconsin (9-1)

Okay, this may now become a curse…I have written this column two times now and each time I’ve written about a savior (team), that team, or teams, seems to flop the following week. This past week’s victims are the teams from New Jersey, specifically Seton Hall and Rutgers who were both 0-fer for the week in the Big East. It was an especially bad week for the Hall as the Pirates had won a nice stretch of games to put themselves in position for an NCAA Tournament bid and are now, at best, back on the bubble.

Purdue Boilermakers

 

Overall Rank: #50