Purdue basketball nonconference challenges come with potentially lucrative payoff

INDIANAPOLIS -- Purdue basketball did not schedule like a team shrinking from the departure of a historic talent.

Zach Edey may be gone, but six of the team’s top eight scorers return. The Boilermakers needed both a challenge worthy of that reputation and a proving ground for a team adapting to a post-Edey identity.

Teams such as Yale and Toledo make for great nonconference opponents due to their consistently strong play. Power conference opponents at Mackey Arena reward already zealous season-ticket holders. Neutral sites serve as mini March run-throughs in the winter.

INSIDER:Cutting sports not Purdue's 'first option,' but creativity, efficiency needed in order to pay athletes

SAM KING:Why Purdue isn't fazed after losing Zach Edey in the middle

Overall, though, this schedule will pressure test a team still carrying lofty expectations in specific, potentially enlightening ways.

Men in the middle

Purdue has plenty of potential successors for Edey’s minutes in the paint. It does not yet know how that production will come together on either end of the floor and what that will mean for the team’s evolving identity. Trey Kaufman-Renn, Caleb Furst, Will Berg, Daniel Jacobsen, Raleigh Burgess, Cam Heide — what combination works best, and does that change from night to night?

It should have a better idea by Big Ten season, thanks to a handful of frontcourt challenges.

• Auburn 6-10 center Johni Broome projects as one of the best players Purdue will face this season, period. He averaged 16.5 points, 8.5 rebounds and 2.2 blocks as a third team All-American last season. Bruce Pearl also brought in former Furman star J.P. Pegues (18.5 points) to create the kind of inside-out conundrum the Boilers usually pin on opponents.

• Alabama added multiple impact transfers after its Final Four run, including SEC All-Freshman guard Aden Holloway (Auburn) and AAC Co-Player of the Year Chirs Youngblood (South Florida). It also added former Rutgers big man Cliff Omoruyi, who scored in double figures in five or six career games against Purdue. He was also a two-time All-Defensive Team pick in the Big Ten and probably welcomes the chance to face an Edey-less team in Mackey Arena.

• Texas A&M’s Pharrel Payne also faced Purdue three times while at Minnesota. He averaged 10 points, 6.1 rebounds and 1.4 blocks last season. Only 6-9 but weighing 255, he represents another veteran challenge for the younger big men on this roster.

Him again?

Consistent performance defines the Matt Painter era. Yet a handful of opposing coaches have given Purdue fits over the past couple of decades.

This schedule could feature two of them:

• Shaka Smart made his name with a Final Four run in 2011 which included an upset of the 3-seed Boilermakers in the second round. Then at Texas, he swept a home-and-home series in 2019-20.

Painter finally broke through in the last meeting with Marquette in the 2022 Gavitt Games. Smart must replace some important talent with Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro now in the NBA. This program won 56 games the past two seasons, though, and reached the Sweet 16 last season.

• Purdue does not know whether it will face Ole Miss and coach Chris Beard as part of the Rady Children’s Invitational (Purdue, Ole Miss, are joined by BYU and NC State in San Diego). It knows it cannot overlook any team he coaches. Beard orchestrated Little Rock’s 2016 first-round upset of the 5-seed Boilers, who led by 13 with under four minutes in regulation.

That in part earned Beard the Texas Tech job, and as a 3 seed the Red Raiders beat 2-seed Purdue in the 2018 East Regional semifinals in Boston. Ole Miss swooned late last season to miss the tourney. However, a team that improved from 12 to 20 wins returns 1,000-point scorer Jaemyn Brakefield and second team All-SEC pick Matthew Murrell.

• No history of note with Texas A&M Corpus Christi coach Jim Shaw. However, former Boilers assistant Steve Lutz had a hand in building this roster, part of which won 21 games last season. Lutz turned the Islanders into a low-major force, then jumped to Western Kentucky and Oklahoma State over the past two years.

What could have been

Beard and N.C. State are only two of the potential reunions during that Thanksgiving week tournament in San Diego.

Until June, Kanon Catchings remained on schedule to become the highest-ranked member of the incoming freshman class. Then he decommitted and enrolled at BYU.

In explaining the move, Catchings' mother referred to Purdue as a “traditional program” compared to BYU’s ability to quickly help her son reach the NBA. Probably a quote that will bounce around the Boilermakers locker room if that matchup materializes.

Follow IndyStar Purdue Insider Nathan Baird on X at @nwbaird.