Indiana vs Purdue. There is no Old Oaken Bucket on Saturdays. This is basketball. They throw traditions at each other like forearm throws.
In fact, how many other famous rivalries could claim that a chair crossing the basketball court was one of the landmark moments? Few of the 215 meetings to date have made headlines on Saturday, so it’s time for a crash course on this age-old feud as the No. 1 Boilermakers show up in Bloomington. .
Indiana – Purdue 101:
The Boilermakers have never played the Hoosiers as a top-ranked team. Or, in Indiana’s terms, the Hoosiers never got a chance to experience the blessed joy of pushing Purdue out of the top spot. Try to guess what Remember last season when Indiana beat his No. 4 Boilermakers 68-65 and he broke his 9th straight loss in the series. Half the students seemed to jump out of the stands. Hoosiers head coach Mike Woodson said that day, “Any time we can beat Purdue, they feel the same way about us. It’s been a while since we beat them. It’s special.” .
Incidentally, Indiana’s winning shot was delivered by Reserve Rob Finnishy, who attended high school seven miles from the Purdue campus. He scored his 20 points in that game and for the rest of the season he scored 92 points.
One of the things that makes this conference so compelling is paint noon. Emphasis on height. Fresh from giving Tom Izzo’s Michigan State defense 38 points, 7-foot-4-inch Zach Eady is the frontrunner for National Player of the Year. And Indiana’s Trace Jackson-Davis has a guy who isn’t far behind Edie, even if he’s seven inches shorter. I did a 3-game stretch when I added the . The Hoosiers lost in Maryland on Tuesday, but he still had 18 points and 20 rebounds.
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Purdue has Awesome Many claim that this uneasy relationship can boast. The Boilermakers can count on more Big Ten season titles (24-22), more Consensus All-Americans (28-16) and Big Ten Coach of the Year awards (11-4) . They won a Big Ten tournament that Indiana never did. They’ve also been dominating 13-2 over the past nine seasons and have a healthy 125-90 lead in the series.
But… but… but…
Five national championship banners hang in Assembly Hall, but not in Mackie Arena. Purdue has not made the Final 4 in his 43 years, but Indiana has made four since. Boilermaker fans don’t like his March gap as a topic of discussion. They’d rather talk about Neil Armstrong being from Purdue and which school sent more men to the moon.
This is no longer Bob Knight vs. Gene Keady. It’s a great chapter in this series, and Keady owns what few other coaches do: a winning record against Knight, barely 21-20, a record that reflects the drama of their rivalry. What the two factions have now is just a sequel. Woodson played Knight and Purdue coach Matt Painter played Keady. The beat continues, but Woodson won’t be bringing a purdue donkey on the TV show like Knight once did.
The time is February 23, 1985. Enraged by a spate of fouls in Indiana, Knight was given the technical whistle just five minutes into the game. It just pisses him off. As Purdue’s Steve Reed prepares to shoot his technical free throw, Knight grabs a chair and…
you probably know the rest. Then we watched Reed care for his chair as the assembly hall roared and the rest of the sport gasped for breath.
36 years ago today Indiana coach Bob Knight famously threw a chair across the court. #TodayInSports #NCAAB 🪑🏀
pic.twitter.com/RTTRlXRoj6—TodayInSports (@TodayInSportsCo) February 23, 2021
The Boilermakers won 72-63, but it didn’t come up much in the ensuing conversation, but Keady tried. “The most important thing I want to convey is that our victory is the major headline,” he told the media afterward. I hope you will.”
There are many memorable games without flying chairs. For example, the 1980 Sweet 16 in Lexington was the only NCAA tournament they ever met. The second-seeded Hoosiers lost to the sixth-seeded Boilermakers, 76-69, and eventually advanced to the Final Four. By the way, their last Final Four.
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Scoring 14 points for Indiana that night was a man returning from mid-season back surgery with such force. He was named the Big His Ten Most Valuable Player, having only appeared in his six league matches. The Final Four was scheduled for his hometown of Indianapolis in 1980, and the championship game was played on his 22nd birthday—what a fairy tale. But then Purdue screwed it up.
“I didn’t have much left in the tank. Physically, I knew I was running in smoke,” he said of his recent loss. “If I can take anything back[from my college career]it’s that match.
“It’s hard to get there. Purdue.”
The Painters’ last game against Indiana was also lost 93–78 at Bloomington in 1993. He scored his 13 points.
Another meeting is high on the list not to be missed. When Larry Bird and Indiana State University were clashing with Magic Johnson and Michigan State University in his 1979 Final Four, his NIT Championship Game, held in midtown Manhattan, was Indiana’s two It was done between teams. The Hoosiers beat the Boilermakers 53-52 in his final six seconds with a Butch Carter jumper.
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Purdue has the more recent ghost of Rob Finnishy, while Indiana has a more distant ghost of a heartbreaker named Chad Austin. His corner 3-pointer with 13.7 seconds remaining beat the Hoosiers at Assembly Hall in 1996.
Indiana’s golden age was the mid-1970s, when the Hoosiers went 56-0 in two regular seasons. His 44 of those 56 games were his double-digit wins. However, his three of his wins over Purdue were by 1, 3 and 4 points.
Indiana was #1 in all those games. Nearly half a century later, the roles have reversed as Purdue has grown accustomed to life as a top-ranked target, and Painter just spoke about the ongoing process this week.
“You have to show some discipline and don’t listen to people because success is more confusing than failure,” he said. “If you can take the noise out of it, take the rhetoric out of your thoughts, and care about what people are going to say in the locker room, you’ll be more successful, you’ll have enough headroom, It’s really hard if you’re always trying to please someone who doesn’t exist or you don’t know.”
Here’s the message he put up on the chalkboard last weekend before sending the Boilermakers out to beat Michigan State at Mackie Arena.
That’s an army of Indiana Red fans rooting for Saturday, none of which are friendly to the number one team in the country.Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall sounds like a launch pad for Cape Canaveral . As Woodson said, it’s Purdue.
