EVANSTON, Ill. — Some quick analysis from No. 11 Purdue's Big Ten title-clinching win at Northwestern Saturday.
WHY THIS WORKED
Purdue wasn't supposed to be good this season, and if you saw the Boilermakers mid-season, wasn't going to be good, and while it's easy to revise history and say you always felt otherwise, those impressions were rooted in reality.
Last year's seniors were great, and there were a bunch of them, and the team that would follow them is almost half new guys, and the not-so-new guys were all in very different roles.
Purdue was the definition of unproven.
So was this team good? Why has it been good, rather?
Because the pieces wound up fitting. It might have required some time and a bit of jimmying here and there, but the puzzle has become a clear picture now, a mosaic of perhaps uncommon players who make more sense together than they do as individuals.
