Purdue and UConn will face off in a national championship game
After strong performances by both teams in the Final Four, UConn will meet Purdue in the national championship game on Monday night in Glendale, Arizona.
Sports Seriously
GLENDALE, Ariz. — On the night of his most public, humiliating failure as a college coach, Purdue coach Matt Painter received a text from Virginia’s Tony Bennett.
It was March 17, 2023, the date a second member joined a club no basketball coach would want to be a part of. Painter’s team had just lost to Fairleigh Dickinson, joining Bennett in men’s NCAA tournament infamy as the only No. 1 seeds ever to lose to a No. 16 seed.
In a profession where misfortune eventually comes for them all, their relationship was unique. Painter and Bennett had undeniably done everything right: they built programs that won big year after year, had a reputation for following the rules, and handled it with class no matter the situation.
Yet this tournament—this stinking, beautiful, crazy, often inexplicable tournament—had made them look like losers.
“You’re at rock bottom,” Painter said Sunday. “But it doesn’t matter who you are. What you do for a living is important. It means a lot, but it’s not who you are. You try to keep it in perspective.”
Famously, Virginia came back 12 months after its collapse against Maryland-Baltimore County to win the national championship. Purdue will have an opportunity to do the exact same thing Monday night, a comparison Painter called an “accurate narrative.”
But whether or not Purdue can pull it off against Connecticut — a team that’s dominated this tournament the last two years — maybe we’re doing it wrong.
Painter is now the coach of the Final Four. By Monday night, he could be the national championship coach.
No one would argue that these designations do not matter. In sports, we draw lines between those who achieve great things and those who do not, because they are tangible achievements that mark history and identify greatness. That’s how it goes. We celebrate the winners and ask the losers what went wrong. It will never change.
But when you look at the whole picture for a coach like Painter, it’s worth asking what’s more important: whether he’s putting a national title on his resume or that he’s been able to be good every year, to be in the mix almost seamlessly, have a team worthy to be considered a disappointment if he happens to have a bad day on the wrong day.
“The problem with a really tough loss, when it ends your season, is you don’t have another game,” Painter said. “You have to sit in it. You have to take it. Some of it is healthy in a way. That’s why I’m trying to stop our players from becoming coaches because there’s such a level of misery.”
It’s a misfortune Painter knows more intimately than most. The Fairleigh Dickinson loss wasn’t his only dance with the wrong Cinderella: There was a second-round loss in the Virginia Commonwealth Final Four in 2011, an upset in Little Rock in 2016, a crash in North Texas in 2021 and an inexplicable performance in 2022 Sweet 16 against Saint Peter’s when the path to the Final Four seemed wide open.
Every coach, if you’ve been around this tournament long enough, will have a few of these marks on their resume. Mike Krzyzewski. John Calipari. Bill Self. Lutnia Olson. Billy Donovan. It has happened to all of them.
But if you lose enough games like this without enough balancing postseason success, the program and coach get a reputation: Chokers. Soft. Not built for March. Choose your offense. That’s part of the deal, too. And Painter, to his immense credit, never ran from it. In a way, he built this team because of it, understanding that he needed more athleticism and shooting around a once-in-a-lifetime center like Zach Eddy to take this program to the next level.
“Just try to be honest about your mistakes, try to be honest about everything,” he said. “Sometimes it’s an inexact science, especially from a recruiting standpoint. But learn from your heavy losses and don’t run from them. Stand up to them. That’s what we tried to do.”
Purdue’s path is a fascinating contrast to UConn and Danny Hurley, who have earned the aura of March monsters. If you ask most college basketball fans how his first two NCAA Tournament trips with the Huskies ended, not many will remember that he was on the wrong side of a 7-10 upset against Maryland and then was bounced the following year by New State of Mexico.
Winning a championship, as UConn did last season, is the ultimate coaching deodorant.
“We can relate,” Hurley said, noting he “felt the heat” in UConn’s first tournament game last year against Iona.
“For them, it was probably even more than that. But they are such a cool program. Their culture is as good as any. They are as well trained as anyone else. You can see they relate to them this tournament, all season, where I don’t think anyone thought it would be this situation for them, but I can certainly relate to the pressure they’ve been under.”
Is this pressure fair? Not always – and that’s our fault. As fans. As members of the media. Like people who are capable of understanding probabilities and variances but choose to focus mostly on the results of a one-off sports event with a crapshoot.
Here’s the more important narrative about Painter, regardless of whether he led Purdue to the Final Four this year: In 19 seasons at Purdue, he’s been to the tournament 15 times. It has finished among the top three teams in the Big Ten regular season standings 12 times with three outright titles and several conference tournament championships.
That makes Painter not just a winner, but one of the best coaches of his generation, period. This makes Purdue the program that every non-Blood person wants to be like.
Why did it take until now to appreciate it?
That’s because this tournament, for all its grandeur, is a fundamentally stupid exercise in champion selection. And it should never, ever change.
The best you can do is just what Painter did, just like Bennett did at Virginia, just like Scott Drew did at Baylor, and just like what Donovan did before that at Florida: Get enough at-bats with good teams , which eventually hit one out of the park.
“You don’t choose your dreams,” Painter said. “We all understand that some of our dreams are also nightmares. You don’t choose those either. That piece of it, to be able to go through it, to feel it, I think it helps you get edgy, it helps you be a little bit sharper.
“However, I think you should only do it once. We’ve done it several times.”
But this is what greatness in college basketball really looks like: the stink bombs, the breakouts, the endless pursuit of something that seems both close and unattainable at the same time.
If Purdue wins on Monday, it won’t erase any of the good or bad things that happened before. It will only close the circle.
