PDF: Purdue-Nebraska statistics
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LINCOLN, Neb. — Purdue's a top-25 team with one of the best players in the country, surrounded by an experienced core loaded with outstanding shooters.
This Big Ten season thus far, it's already won on the home floors of traditional Big Ten heavyweights Michigan State and Ohio State and in its home meeting with league frontrunner Wisconsin, the Boilermakers rolled, looking the part of a potential conference champion.
But adding to the pain of Purdue's maddening 83-80 loss at Nebraska Sunday was this reality: The Boilermakers, despite all of this, might already be out of the Big Ten race because of losses to Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska, a trio that has combined to lose 16 conference games to this point.
Nebraska came into Sunday's game on a five-game losing streak.
Purdue came in rolling, with its three-game winning streak seemingly giving some reason to believe it had solved its crippling defensive inconsistency, and its win at Michigan State looking like a corner turned against its sketchy play on the road prior. The Boilermakers seemed to have their turnover problem contained.
Sunday, none of it proved true. Purdue allowed 83 points to a team coming off three straight games of sub-60. It let slip a lead that stood at five points with a little more than three minutes left. It turned the ball over repeatedly when it mattered the most. It got worked off the offensive glass, to the tune of 15 offensive rebounds and 17 second-chance points for the Cornhuskers.
"We didn't guard how you have to guard on the road to win," point guard P.J. Thompson said. "We gave up 83 points. That's not going to win you a lot of games.
"We did pretty much everything we weren't supposed to do in order for them to score."
That's not entirely true. Purdue did limit Nebraska leading scorers Tai Webster and Glynn Watson to 8-of-25 shooting, as was its aim.
Maybe, though, the emphasis on those players opened the floodgates for others, as Matt Painter theorized thereafter.
Reserve forward Jack McVeigh made four first-half threes and finished with a game-high 21 points. He averaged six-and-a-half on the season prior to today.
"Everybody's a good player at this level," Mathias said. "You can't focus in on two guys and act like the other guys aren't even there. (Jack) McVeigh's obviously a great shooter and we let him go a couple times and it burned us."
Then there's Jeriah Horne, who sucker-punched Purdue for 16 on 7-of-12 shooting, beating his scoring average by more than a dozen. He was a healthy scratch in the Cornhuskers' loss at Northwestern last time out.
Painter was asked if Horne's productivity surprised him.
"It surprised me that he played," Painter said. "Most guys who don't play the game before don't play."
Purdue led by as many as nine in the first half, then trailed by six at halftime. At the 9:47 mark of the second half, it held a seven-point lead, then Nebraska generated a dunk off an offensive rebound, a theme on this day.
"Down the stretch it came down to rebounding," said Caleb Swanigan, whose team was surprisingly outrebounded 40-35 despite his 14. "They beat us on that."
Sure did.
Michael Jacobson's putback of a missed three-pointer gave Nebraska the lead with 44 seconds left, overtaking Purdue, which had led by five with 2:21 left after Mathias hit two threes as part of a team-high 19-point day.
Purdue went inside to Swanigan on the next three trips.
The result of those trips: Turnover, turnover, turnover.
Mathias' three-pointer to tie it in the final second or two missed, same as it did a few weeks ago at the end of Purdue's equally frustrating loss at Iowa.
"I think I got a good look, but I think I rushed it a little, too," he said.
"It shouldn't have gotten to that point."
That's a fair assessment.
It came down to a lot of things, most notably rebounding and defense, areas where Purdue wasn't good enough to win a game it was supposed to win, perhaps easily.
"You can't rely (just) on your offense at the end of games," Thompson said. "You have to be able to get stops and we didn't."
And so now Purdue returns home for a good Northwestern team with the reality that its Big Ten title aspirations are on the mat with still so many games to play, not because it hasn't shown it can beat the best teams in the league, but because it hasn't been able to beat some of those it's supposed to.
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