Roosevelt Barnes on Caleb Swanigan's NBA decision

All-American Caleb Swanigan did seriously consider returning to Purdue for his junior season, according to Roosevelt Barnes, his father and closest adviser.

"Biggie just made up his mind here recently," Barnes said, shortly after Swanigan announced he'd enter the draft. "Just in the last couple hours."

Though it had been something of a foregone conclusion throughout Swanigan's player-of-the-year-caliber season that his Purdue days were numbers, multiple indications in recent days put the possibility of an improbable return to college at even, or better.

But after withdrawing from the draft a year ago at this time, Swanigan opted to remain this time around, ending his Boilermaker career after two seasons, with ample numbers, a slew of individual honors and a Big Ten title, among other things, to show for it.

"It just came down to Biggie feeling like he was ready and feeling like he wanted to go take on the challenge of the NBA a little more than the challenge of winning the national championship," Barnes said. "He did feel like he had some unfinished business (at Purdue), because he's very goal-oriented and he wanted to win that national championship.

"That's what took him so long to make his decision."

It had to have been a consideration, too, to look at how much more Swanigan could have reasonably done as a junior than he did as a sophomore.

"He had a historic season, one of the great seasons in college basketball in the last 25 years according to some of the analytics, with Tim Duncan and maybe Blake Griffin," Barnes said, citing points-and-rebounds totals that rivaled those two NBA stars in college. "It was a historic season, but if he came back he could have done more. He could have had better numbers next year, and he's not big on the individual awards anyway. It's the national championship thing that he missed out on, that's what irks him more than anything."

Now, Swanigan moves to the professional level, with a few weeks prior to the June 22 draft to optimize his positioning.

"I think he's going to be a first-round draft choice," Barnes said. "Where he goes, I don't know. No one knows right now. He's been in the process of going through all the workouts and doing well in those, so we'll just have to wait and see."

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