The Lunatic is sad.  Tuesday night was rough for him.  As many of you know, the Lunatic went to college at Purdue, and so you can imagine his excitement that the Boilermakers went into this week with a one game lead in the Big 10 standings.  If the Boilers won their two road games this week against Minnesota and Northwestern, they would be the outright Big 10 regular season champions.  Many might not realize this, but Purdue has already won 23 regular season championships – the most of any school in the Big 10.

I was mildly optimistic when the season started – knowing that we had Carson Edwards coming back.  But after starting the season 6-5 and losing big on the road to Michigan, it looked like the Boilers would simply be playing to try to get back into the NCAA tournament.  But Purdue went on to win 16 of their next 18 games – with only road losses to ranked Michigan State and Maryland to get into this great position.

Unfortunately, for the Lunatic, one of those two games they needed to win was a road game on Senior Night at Minnesota.  The Gophers came out strong, built a double digit lead, and the Boilers found themselves simply trying to catch up.  And they almost did.  With just 5 seconds left in the game, they had cut the lead all the way down to 2 points.  Then, the agony.

Minnesota tried to in-bound the ball with a lob pass, and Grady Eifert jumped in front of the intended receiver of the pass and almost stole it before the ball harmlessly fell out of bounds.  Since it was a close play (and the Minnesota player was also reaching for the ball before it went out of bounds), they went to review it.  As they reviewed it, you could hear the commentators say.  This is going to be Purdue’s ball – that looks like it might be the Minnesota’s player hand that tipped it.  But that is irrellevant, because you can see as the Gopher is stumbling towards the boundary, the ball barely hits his back, takes a bounce and then hits his leg as he is standing out of bounds.

I am all excited to see if the Boilers can hit a buzzer beater and send the game to overtime.  And then you hear the crowd erupt in applause.  The referees ruled that it was Minnesota’s ball!  I guess they felt it was Eifert’s hand that hit it, and there wasn’t enough evidence of the ball hitting the Minnesota player twice.  Maybe they thought that it was in their best interest if they ever wanted to leave Minnesota in one piece.  Who knows – Purdue had to foul, Minnesota hit two free throws, and the game was over – and so was any chance to win the title outright.

To be fair, Purdue did not lose because of that one call.  Carson Edwards went 7-31 – you can’t have your best player taking almost half of your shots and shooting 22.6% from the field – the Gophers shut him down.  Minnesota was in the lead most of the game – sometimes by double digits.  And there is no telling that if Purdue had got the ball that they would have made the last second basket.  If I was not a Purdue fan, I actually would have felt horrible if a bubble team on Senior Night had done all of that to earn a signature win that could push them into the tournament to surprisingly lose on a freaky buzzer beater after that type of play.  BUT I AM A PURDUE FAN – I WANTED TO SEE THAT FREAKY BUZZER BEATER!!!!!!

The Boilers still can up their total to 24 and win a share of the title by beating Northwestern (on the Wildcat’s Senior Night).  But there is no more room for error.  They are now tied both with Michigan and Michigan State with one game to play, and they play each other on Sunday – one of them has to win.

So, I thought to myself I might as well drown myself in basketball stats.  Lets get the box scores for my stats page that only the statisticians probably look at (if anyone does).  I pulled everything down, and was happy how fast it ran – only to find that something is wrong on the NCAA’s site and 70+ games had no box scores.  The link existed – but all the numbers were blank.  So, my code thinks the score of all of those games are 0-0.

Not sure what I am going to do about that – it would be too much effort to type in all the box scores for those games.  So, I have to hope that somewhere else on the NCAA site, I can find the data.  I think I have some options, but who knows.  Regardless – you can imagine that this did not improve my mood.

Last night was a sad night.  Fortunately, there is great medicine for that!!!!  March is here – and the conference tournaments are already starting!!!!  There is so much basketball to be watched to make the Lunatic happy again!!!!!!!