My Two Cents: Bad Matchup For Purdue? Let's Call it Extremely Challenging

Purdue has advanced to the Sweet 16, and No. 1 seed Houston awaits on Friday night in the regional semifinals at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The Cougars have the nation's best defense and will make life difficult for the Boilermakers' scorers.

Tom Brew | Mar 27, 2025

Purdue guard Braden Smith (3) drives against McNeese's Bryant Selebangue during the second round of the NCAA Tournament. / Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images

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INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Purdue is a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and on Selection Sunday that sounded about right. They are 24-11, finished tied for fourth in the Big Ten and lost in the conference tournament quarterfinals.

If anything, it might have been generous. Just a touch.

They dispatched a pair of double-digits seeds — No. 13 High Point and No. 12 McNeese — last week in Providence, R.I. The reward for two wins as a No. 4 is a showdown with one of the top four teams in the country. Houston is the No. 1 seed in the Midwest, and the Cougars are really good.

They are very much a pain in the butt to try to score against, and they're a bad matchup for the Boilermakers. They have two athletic bigs that can hassle forward Trey Kaufman-Renn inside, and they have swarming perimeter players who will try to make Braden Smith uncomfortable.

Friday night's game — which will start well after 10 p.m. ET, following Kentucky-Tennessee — is going to be a real challenge for Purdue. And surviving is going to be tough for the 8.5-point underdogs.

"Houston is a fabulous all-around team, No. 1 team in the country in defense,'' Purdue coach Matt Painter said Thursday during media availability at Lucas Oil Stadium. "They're so active and they do such a good job disrupting the basketball, whether that's their post defense and their doubles or it's their aggressive ball-screen defense or just playing passing lanes and their overall pressure.

"I could go on and on about it. They're an elite defensive team. This is the No. 1 defense in the country. This is a big challenge for our team.''

Houston is 32-4 on the season, and Big 12 regular-season and tournament champions. They've won 15 straight games, and 28 of 29. When Painter calls them ''elite'' defensively, he's not kidding. The eye-popping stats just roll on and on, and this is while playing in the Big 12, a league with plenty of offensive weapons.

Look at these numbers, courtesy of the NCAA:

Scoring defense: Houston (58.4) is first nationally out of 355 teams.
Field goal percentage defense: Houston (38.39%) is fifth nationally.
Scoring margin: Houston (16.0) is fourth nationally.

That is absolutely elite.

The good thing, though, is that how Houston plays won't come as a surprise to Purdue. The Boilermakers play an aggressive nonconference schedule for a reason — to prepare for games like this in late March. They played ranked teams Alabama, Auburn, Texas A&M, OIe Miss and Marquette, and saw plenty of aggressive, stifling defense.

That's why Painter does it. Even with an experienced lineup anchored by juniors Smith, Kaufman-Renn and Fletcher Loyer, having memories to lean back on this time of year is a big thing. Especially for Smith, one of America's best point guards. He's seen it all, and can react to things on the fly.

"The best thing I can do for him is go play teams in the nonconference that are like Houston,'' Painter said. "We didn't play Houston, but playing Auburn, playing Texas A&M, playing Ole Miss, playing Marquette. Those are some of the people he's played against, some really good programs, some really good coaches.

"But this might be the biggest challenge he's had. He does a lot for us, and we're hoping through our experiences that we've put him in the best position to be successful. Some people think we overscheduled this year. But anybody would be a fool right now to think that the teams that beat us in non-conference didn't help us to get to this point because they were so good.

"Auburn (also a No. 1 seed) is so good. Texas A&M is so good. Shaka Smart and what they do (at Marquette). Chris Beard and how they operate (at Ole Miss). That's difficult to go against. He's had those experiences. He's been in the Final Four. He's won two Big Ten championships. He's had a lot of different experiences. But with all that being said, Houston's defense could be the best out of all those people I've mentioned.''

Smith played five nonconference games against ranked teams as a sophomore, too. Add in the six NCAA Tournament games last year on the way to the national championship, and Smith and the Boilers know what it's like to be tested.

"It's one of those things where you know every game is tough,'' Painter said about any Sweet 16 matchup. "We were sitting here last year, we had to play Gonzaga in this game. And then we ended up playing Tennessee. Now being able to play Houston, who had this year just played Gonzaga in a very close game.

So everybody's great. Nobody messed around that ended up in the Sweet 16. They had to earn their way here. If you look at Houston, you could argue that they're the best team in the country, especially after their first five games. They lost three of their four games early. One thing that's so impressive about them is they've had some injuries and they've had some foul trouble and they don't skip a beat. They keep going.''

Houston is led by Kelvin Sampson, the 69-year-old who coached against Painter briefly during his short stint at Indiana from 2006 to 2008 before being fired for recruiting violations. He was slapped with a five-year show-cause penalty, and served his sentence in the NBA.

He was hired at Houston in 2014 and had a losing season his first year. That was his last. In his fourth year (2018), he made the NCAA Tournament and has been there ever since. He has a 16-6 record in NCAA Tournament games and reached the Final Four in 2021.

In the last seven years, he's 213-35, an 85.9 winning percentage. "It's a great program, and he's a great coach,'' Painter said of Sampson.

But Purdue has been there before. They are used to epic battles. What's another one, right?

"It's no different than playing Gonzaga last year in the Sweet 16,'' he said. "You could give all the same superlatives to Mark Few and his team and his program. That was going to be tough. Beating Tennessee was going to be tough. Obviously we were fortunate enough to do that. You're comparing two different types of toughness, right?

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