With football season upon and basketball visit season along with it, GoldandBlack.com continues a new weekly feature — the Monday Morning Purdue Recruiting Roundup.

It's Feb. 16. Tonight's game at Northwestern will be Purdue's sixth game already this month.

Thursday, Purdue gets its first day off since Jan. 24, the Monday after the Boilermakers last played Northwestern. (The NCAA would normally mandate one per week but scheduling crunches and COVID-based allowances have softened that requirement.)

Has Purdue been in a drastically different situation than other teams? Not really. The stakes of the fifth-ranked team's games are higher and the environments and opponents a bit more charged up. And the Michigan postponement really was a tough break for the Boilermakers. But otherwise, this is college basketball nowadays.

The Big Ten's expanded its geographic borders and conference season to 20 games and especially when a team's needed for certain TV time slots, things can move at a pretty break-neck pace.

That's been Purdue's reality for weeks now, and lately, the Boilermakers have looked a bit affected. They've endured stretches of uncharacteristic three-point-shooting struggles and have been behind defensively at times. The Michigan game in Ann Arbor was a perfect storm of, well, you know.

Purdue's not gotten time off, and it's not gotten time to really practice in a meaningful sense.

"I was getting on the guys in the huddle during the (Maryland) game, 'Everybody's tired,'" senior Sasha Stefanovic said. "Other teams are tired and also going through the same sort of schedule we are. We're in a position to win a Big Ten title and when you're in that position, it doesn't matter If you're tired, not feeling great or whatever the case may be. We have an ultimate goal we want to reach. To reach that sort of goal, you have to persevere through a lot of different things. That's kind of the mindset you have to have to win a title in this league."