Pre-Dancing Handsomeness!!!

The Handsome Duo invites much of the Purdue Blogosphere for a cookout...

The fellas don't agree on everything, but they all think Vandy will be the next NCAA champ.

But will it be this guy:

or this guy that leads the Commodores to the promised land?

Tune in and find out...NOW!!

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Should You Be Confident Or SCURRED?

Solid guard play

It's tourney week and your Boilers are in their sixth consecutive NCAA tournament after their sixth consecutive 20-win season. They've also won 13 first round games in a row, with their last first round loss coming in 1993 to Rhode Island. They're playing St. Mary's in the first round.

This year's iteration of the Boilers, as a 10-seed, are one of those situations where I can honestly give you both a scenario to make you optimistic as well as a scenario that should make you go into a cold sweat. So what to do first?

Why You Should Be Excited

The Boilers are a ten-seed, sure. But I look at the 7, 8, 9 and 10 seeds as teams that the committee wasn't quite sure what to do with. There's almost always a serious sleeper in those seeds each year that feels slighted by the perceived underseeding. They're often a bunch of similarly matched teams so hey, let's have 'em play each other. I think the 8/9 and 7/10 games are as close to the play-in games (err, I'm sorry...First Round games) as you can get in the tourney. Or, further into the tourney. Shut up, NCAA, none of us really believe the Tues-Weds games are "first round games."

So I think the 7/10 game is similar to the 8/9 game with one big difference -- you won't have to face a 1-seed until the regional finals (Elite 8). This is huge, for a number of reasons. For one, the 1-seed could get bounced by then. The down side of course is that they may also be in their groove by then but hey, if your team advances all the way to the end of the second weekend, you've got to expect some tough games ahead. The 8/9 winner has to play the 1 right away, which is only good in the sense that maybe you catch them tired or looking past you, etc., and if you do beat them as the 8/9, you now have the 1's path to the Final Four. Not insignificant.

But back to being the 10. If you do advance, you play the 2 next. Twos are sometimes suspect, but the 2 Purdue would face is Kansas. The only things I would say that are in Purdue's favor here are that A) Bill Self's Kansas teams either go to the Final Four or poop themselves early in the tourney and B) Kansas has been challenged seriously by Mizzou this year. Mizzou is a senior-laden team that can get hot shooting. Sound familiar?

And after that, well, if the Boilers were to advance out of the first weekend, this suddenly becomes the best chance to advance to a Final Four since the 2000 team had to only beat an 8-seed in the regional finals to get there. You'd be looking at potentially playing teams like SDSU, Georgetown, Michigan, Temple, UNC, etc. Do any of those truly frighten you? And again, keep in mind that your boys are only taking on UNC if it's a Final Four trip on the line -- I'd take that deal right now, wouldn't you?

And what if...what if a 15 beat a 2 and Detroit moved on?

Why You Should Be Scurrred

Well, we're Purdue fans, right? We know what can happen when we're expecting/hoping for good things. Also, they are a double digit seed, which is never advantageous. You're going to need to topple higher seeds the whole time, unless some serious upsets occur.

There's also the ever-present possibility that the cold-shooting, non-hustling, zero-rebounding iteration of Purdue will show up. I am confident this isn't going to happen in light of the way this team seemed to really begin to figure things out late in the season, but you never know. Parts of this version of the Boilermakers were visible for a while in Bloomington and it was too much to overcome.

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Frontcourt?

So do the Boilers advance? I think it's fair to expect this experienced Boilermakers team from the best conference in the land to defeat the winner of the 11th-best conference in the land. St. Mary's seems cocky (especially for a bunch of basketball-playing nuns) and that is good, in my opinion.

Boilerdowd and I were at St. Mary's most recent tournament game, in which they were slapped around by Baylor in Houston in 2010. That's the kind of dedication we have to scouting for you. What can we tell you from that? Not much.

This Gaels team is good, to be sure. Only five losses on the season tell you that, but they did lose to Denver and Loyola Marymount, while also being handled well by Baylor, Gonzaga and Murray State.

But those three are all tourney teams, you might hear a Gael fan tell you (if you can find one). And to that I say this....so is Purdue.

Choo-choo, muthas.

Boilers Get the 10 Seed in Omaha

While J and I don't see eye-to-eye on this, I didn't like Purdue's odds to make it to the dance about a month and one-half ago...so, for me at least, this seeding is like playing with the house money for Matty's boys.

I know, I know, a lot of people had Purdue as an 8 or 9 seed...but as CBS announced the final region, and Purdue had not gotten its marching orders just yet, the idea of having to play UNC in North Carolina in the second round might have been the very-worst scenario for this Purdue team.

So, here's what we know:
-Purdue will be playing St. Mary's in Omaha on Friday.
-This will be the second time Purdue has played a Gaels team this season (Iona was the first)
-St. Mary's won the WCC, but the RPI has them as the second-best team in the conference...Gonzaga was slightly better.  The Gael players had Champion belts printed on the t-shirts they were wearing when they received their seeding on national TV.
-The WCC is the 11th-best conference in the land
-Of St. Mary's five losses, only one was versus a bad team- Denver.  The rest of their losses came versus teams in the top-25 of the RPI
-St. Mary's has a handful of Australians on their squad and a Lithuanian.  Their leading scorer is an Aussi- Dellavedova bombs threes (making 36% of them on the year) and averaged nearly 16 pts/gm and a whopping 6.3 ast/gm
-Their second-leading scorer is Rob Jones who averages nearly 15/gm.  He'll probably have Hummel and Byrd on him for most of the game on Friday

What's to like:
-Purdue has matched up with teams without a dominant big man pretty well all season.
-Our Boilers will be the underdog...versus a media darling mid-major.  Hopefully smart guys in the national media talk down Purdue all week- that's helped Matty motivate his squads in the past few years.
-Purdue has been very successful in early rounds of the tournament under Painter
-Not playing in Albuquerque or Portland
-SMC's champ belts make me think that they're cocky.  Good.
-Not having to play UNC, Syracuse or Kentucky in round 2

Aussi Aussi Aussi

What's not to like
-Playing a team that scores a lot of points and shoots the ball very well
-Having to hear about your Boilers as an underdog for the next four days...or worse, no one even talking about them- get ready for the latter.
-Playing in Omaha...with a potential second round game versus Kansas in their backyard
-It's an 8-9 hour drive for most Purdue fans to Omaha
-Teams like UConn, who played like dog crap for much of the year (like Purdue) were rewarded with higher seeds than Purdue
-LewJack tweaking his wrist and rumors of Hummel having a sore knee late in the game v. aOSU

Tip-off times will be released later tonight.