Five thoughts on the Wildcats' epic upset of No. 1 Purdue
After a day to gather our thoughts – and stop the ringing in our ears – we try to put Northwestern’s 64-58 win over No. 1 Purdue in perspective.
Here are five thoughts:
It was the biggest win in program history. This is, of course, up for debate. We realize that choosing the best Northwestern win is like picking your favorite child (and given the small number of them, you may have as many kids as the Wildcats have big wins).
In our book, though, Sunday’s victory was the biggest in 118 years of mostly futile Northwestern basketball.
The previous title holder was the March 1, 2017 win over Michigan. That game had “The Pass,” a full-court heave from Nate Taphorn to Dererk Pardon, who banked in the game-winning shot at the buzzer to clinch Northwestern’s spot in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history. That play, and that moment, is forever etched in the minds of Wildcat fans. You never forget your first.
A case could also be made for Northwestern’s first-round tournament win just a couple weeks later over Vanderbilt in Salt Lake City. But the achievement that season was getting there; winning a game was frosting on the cake.
Either way, this game, and this win, when taken as a whole, was bigger. The Michigan game will always be the greatest single moment. But that Michigan team was unranked. The Wildcats actually had a better record than the Wolverines that day (20-9 vs. 19-10). The game was viewed as a tossup.
On Sunday, the Wildcats were the clear underdogs against Purdue, the No. 1 team in the country and the 800-pound gorilla of the Big Ten. It was David vs. Goliath. The Boilers were 23-2. They featured 7-foot-4, 305-pound national player of the year frontrunner Zach Edey. The Wildcats had never beaten an AP No. 1 team before; they were 0-18.
Evanston was the center of the college basketball world for a few hours on Sunday afternoon, before the Super Bowl, and they seized the moment and took down the big, bad Boilermakers in a seismic upset. It doesn’t get any bigger – or better – than that.
Welsh-Ryan was up for grabs. This was, without a doubt, the biggest game in the five-year history of the new Welsh-Ryan Arena.
The arena was sold-out, thanks in large part to the great number of Purdue fans who made the trip up I-65. But the split crowd gives Welsh-Ryan one of the most unique atmospheres in the nation, with cheers rising back-and-forth, as the fortunes of both teams ebb and flow.
Northwestern’s student sections behind the baskets were packed 90 minutes before tip-off. They erupted when Matt Nicholson threw down a two-hand dunk to open the scoring and beat his chest running back down the floor.
The Wildside was not only loud, but organized. “D-U-I” chants arose every time Purdue’s Mason Gillis touched the ball. They screamed “over-rated” whenever Edey attempted a free throw, and “Chi-cken sand-wich” when any Boiler missed a free throw.
The roof was ready to come off multiple times in the closing four minutes, when Northwestern outscored the Boilers 17-3 to clinch the upset. When Audige got a steal and a dunk to pull the Cats to within three with 3:15 left. When he drained a three from the corner to give Northwestern its first lead of the second half with 1:39 to go. When they put football coach Pat Fitzgerald on the video board, red-faced, screaming and pumping his fists.
And when the clock reached triple-zeroes, they rushed the court and engulfed the players. The crowd didn’t break up for a good 20 minutes after the game. No one wanted to go home.
Head coach Chris Collins played and coached for 13 years at Duke, so he knows what a loud, hostile arena sounds like. He put Sunday’s atmosphere along with the best he’s ever experienced.
“Nothing was any better than what you saw today at Welsh-Ryan,” he said. “It was pretty special.”
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MORE ON THE GAME: Takeaways: Northwestern 64, No. 1 Purdue 58 l Suddenly clutch Cats close out historic win over No. 1 Purdue
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This team is tough. As Collins said defiantly after the game, “A lot of talk is that we can’t close. This is a different year and a different team.”
That’s for sure. Sunday’s win over Purdue makes the Wildcats 8-3 in games decided by single digits this season. Last year, they were 5-12.
Audige, after missing nine of his first 11 shots, scored 10 points, including two three-pointers, in less than two minutes. Boo Buie, Ty Berry and Audige all came up with critical steals. It was Northwestern that made the critical plays when they needed it to clinch the win down the stretch, and it was Purdue who made the critical mistakes. The Boilermakers turned the ball over three times in the final minute; Edey turned it over twice.
But it wasn’t only Northwestern’s clutch plays that were impressive on Sunday. It’s how they even got to the closing minutes within striking distance.
The Wildcats had very little going offensively in the second half outside of Buie, who single-handedly kept Northwestern in the game for most of the period and wound up with 26 points, two more than Edey. The Cats missed eight straight shots at one point, but kept getting stops on the other end so Purdue couldn’t pull away.
The Cats were relentless, scratching, clawing and hanging around until Audige finally got hot and they made the big push to win the game in the last four minutes.
“All we asked them to do was fight,” said Collins.
Maybe no one exemplified that fight more than Buie, who drove into the paint time and again, whether Edey was there or not. Giving away some 16 inches, Buie got his shot blocked twice in a row by Edey in one sequence in the second half.
But, like his teammates, he just kept coming.
“He’s 7-4,” said Buie. “Somebody’s gotta attack him.”
The win puts Northwestern’s tournament resume over the top. While there are still six more regular-season games remaining, Sunday’s win means that Northwestern just needs a couple more Ws to nail down the second trip to the Big Dance in school history. With Purdue’s skin now on the wall, you can put Northwestern’s wins this season up against anyone’s.
The Wildcats, who are 6-2 on the road this season, now have wins at Michigan State, Indiana, Ohio State and Wisconsin, and home wins over Illinois and Purdue. While you could make the argument that some of the names on that list don’t mean as much as they usually do, and that the Big Ten is down this season, Sunday’s win over No. 1 Purdue gives the Wildcats an unassailable feather in their tournament cap.
But don’t take our word for it. Take it from BTN’s Robbie Hummel.
“Northwestern’s wins in league play are as good as anyone’s in the Big Ten,” he said in a tweet. “No bad losses. Still some work to be done but they are on the cusp. What a job by Chris Collins and this Northwestern group.”
Collins has already earned an extension. If he was still on the fence about Collins’ fate, Sunday’s win should have made up the mind of athletic director Dr. Derrick Gragg. Northwestern’s coach began the season seemingly in a battle to save his job. Now he’s in a battle for the Big Ten Coach of the Year award.
Last spring, Gragg issued a statement that read like an ultimatum. Gragg said he would evaluate all aspects of the program that had just completed a fifth straight losing season with a coach that he hadn’t hired.
“I have tasked Coach Collins with making necessary changes to build towards success in the 2022-23 campaign,” Gragg said in the statement.
Well, 11 months later, those changes have been made. And then some.
There’s the record, sure. The Wildcats already have three more wins overall than they had last year, and two more wins in conference. Their 9-5 Big Ten record is better than the 2016-17 tournament team’s mark after 14 games. They just beat the No. 1 team in the country for the first time in school history to put them on the doorstep of their second Big Dance.
But more than that, Collins completely transformed his team. Severely shorthanded after losing leading scorer and rebounder Pete Nance, and starting center Ryan Young to the transfer portal, and with just 10 scholarship players at his disposal, he completely remade his team. He looked at the roster and decided they needed to be defensive stalwarts to have a chance to compete. So he hired Chris Lowry as an assistant and sold all the players into this defense-first mentality. The results have been spectacular, way beyond any reasonable expectation that Gragg might have had.
Let’s take a look at his player development in the last year.
Nicholson went from a 7-foot fouling machine who averaged 4.3 minutes per game last season to a legitimate Big Ten starting center, averaging six points and six rebounds per game while giving the Wildcats a defensive presence at the rim. He went for six points, four rebounds and three assists while battling Edey on Sunday.
Barnhizer played in just 11 games a year ago but is now a “glue guy” for the Wildcats, averaging 6.4 points and 4.4 rebounds off the bench. Against the Boilers, the Indiana native had six points, five rebounds, and two key free throws and a steal in crunch time.
Berry went from a role as a three-point shooter off the bench to an all-around contributor who has greatly improved his defense and rebounding. He quietly picked up five points, seven rebounds, two assists and three steals against Purdue, including the game-clinching theft with nine seconds to go.
Nick Martinelli was a former Elon commit and an after-thought addition to the 2022 class who has been a revelation offensively since Julian Roper II was sidelined with an injury.
So Gragg should give Collins that contract extension. He’s proven what he can do as a coach. Collins' precarious contract status hurt his recruiting in this current cycle. Gragg should add a few years to his deal to give him a fighting chance this season.