Matt Painter could see it in the eyes of his Purdue team as Fairleigh Dickinson’s miracle upset bid started becoming more real. Players started passing up open shots on offense, lacking the self-confidence in that moment to take the shots they’d made thousands of times in empty gyms. Nobody seemed comfortable with the ball in their hands.
Whoa, he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want anything to do with it, Painter thought to himself.
It was the start of an all-systems failure, one that ended in the No. 1–seed Boilermakers and National Player of the Year Zach Edey falling in the first round of the NCAA tournament—the most shocking March Madness upset ever. There had been some warning signs late in the regular season, but nothing that could have predicted this: a loss to what was at the time the 299th-ranked team in KenPom’s analytics model, the shortest team in Division I and a team in the postseason only because NEC champion Merrimack was ineligible for the NCAA tournament.
