The Lunatic is sad.\u00a0 Tuesday night was rough for him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If the Boilers won their two road games this week against Minnesota and Northwestern, they would be the outright Big 10 regular season champions.\u00a0 Many might not realize this, but Purdue has already won 23 regular season championships – the most of any school in the Big 10.<\/p>\n
I was mildly optimistic when the season started – knowing that we had Carson Edwards coming back.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, for the Lunatic, one of those two games they needed to win was a road game on Senior Night at Minnesota.\u00a0 The Gophers came out strong, built a double digit lead, and the Boilers found themselves simply trying to catch up.\u00a0 And they almost did.\u00a0 With just 5 seconds left in the game, they had cut the lead all the way down to 2 points.\u00a0 Then, the agony.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As they reviewed it, you could hear the commentators say.\u00a0 This is going to be Purdue’s ball – that looks like it might be the Minnesota’s player hand that tipped it.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I am all excited to see if the Boilers can hit a buzzer beater and send the game to overtime.\u00a0 And then you hear the crowd erupt in applause.\u00a0 The referees ruled that it was Minnesota’s ball!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe they thought that it was in their best interest if they ever wanted to leave Minnesota in one piece.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
To be fair, Purdue did not lose because of that one call.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Minnesota was in the lead most of the game – sometimes by double digits.\u00a0 And there is no telling that if Purdue had got the ball that they would have made the last second basket.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 BUT I AM A PURDUE FAN – I WANTED TO SEE THAT FREAKY BUZZER BEATER!!!!!!<\/p>\n
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).\u00a0 But there is no more room for error.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
So, I thought to myself I might as well drown myself in basketball stats.\u00a0 Lets get the box scores for my stats page that only the statisticians probably look at (if anyone does).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The link existed – but all the numbers were blank.\u00a0 So, my code thinks the score of all of those games are 0-0.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 So, I have to hope that somewhere else on the NCAA site, I can find the data.\u00a0 I think I have some options, but who knows.\u00a0 Regardless – you can imagine that this did not improve my mood.<\/p>\n
Last night was a sad night.\u00a0 Fortunately, there is great medicine for that!!!!\u00a0 March is here – and the conference tournaments are already starting!!!!\u00a0 There is so much basketball to be watched to make the Lunatic happy again!!!!!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Lunatic is sad.\u00a0 Tuesday night was rough for him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If the Boilers won their two road games this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1401"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1405,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1401\/revisions\/1405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}