ROSEMONT, Ill. — Purdue stars Braden Smith and Trey Kaufman-Renn walked into the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center together Thursday, both in dark suits with white shirts, ready to tackle what should be their final Big Ten Media Day in advance of what is expected to be their last season of college basketball.
They looked sharp.
They sounded confident.
In the previous three seasons, they have already helped the Boilermakers win two outright Big Ten regular-season titles and one Big Ten Tournament championship while making three straight appearances in the NCAA Tournament, one of which resulted in a trip to the 2024 national title game. Either could have left Purdue after last season and still finished their college careers with more wins and accolades than most.
But neither did.
Because they’re not satisfied.
In fact, when asked about his expectations for the upcoming season, Kaufman-Renn, an obvious All-American candidate in Purdue’s frontcourt, didn’t shy away from the idea that he wants this to be his best season yet. And given that he and Smith, the latter of whom is an obvious national player of the year candidate in Purdue’s backcourt, have already won conference championships and played in the title game of the NCAA Tournament, there’s really only one way to make this their best season as Boilermakers, and that’s by winning the NCAA Tournament in April for what would be the first time in program history.
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And, yes, that’s definitely the goal.
“I remember [former Boilermaker] Sasha [Stefanovic] telling me when I redshirted my first year that you have to make your senior year the best year,” Kaufman-Renn said. “What we having going for us this year, all the great pieces, all the great personalities, I’m excited to do it.”
And a lot of people believe they will.
As we sit here in early October, now fewer than four weeks away from the start of the regular season, Purdue (+900 according to latest odds at FanDuel) is the favorite in the betting markets to win the 2026 NCAA Tournament. Moreover, when my colleague Matt Norlander and I recently asked more than 100 college coaches to tell us which team they believe will be the sport’s best this season, the leading vote-getter was Purdue.
“The thing that jumps out is, I think, we have one of the best, or the best, frontcourts [and], I think, we have one of the best, or the best, backcourts,” said Purdue coach Matt Painter. “We have good guys. We have competitors. We have that corporate DNA that the Spurs had [under former coach Gregg Popovich]. It’s very hard to get that in college basketball today — but we have it.”
Undeniably, they do — plus one of the best and most-respected coaches in the sport, as evidenced by the results of this year’s Candid Coaches series. Again, we polled more than 100 college coaches who told us that they believe Painter is college basketball’s best X’s and O’s coach and the person they’d most like their son to spend four years with if their son were a Division I basketball player.
It’s high praise, earned.
And among the reasons there’s a real chance the Big Ten’s most-famous streak — zero national championships for any conference members since Michigan State won the 2000 NCAA Tournament — could end this season. To be clear, there are other legitimate title-contenders throughout the league with Michigan, UCLA and Illinois each joining the Boilermakers in the top nine of BartTorvik.com’s preseason rankings. But the Big Ten team with the best combination of talent, experience, continuity and coaching is the one that plays home games inside Mackey Arena, where a banner that reads “2026 NCAA Tournament Champions” will hang someday if Painter, Smith, Kaufman-Renn and everybody else in Purdue’s program are actually able to accomplish what they aren’t even trying to hide they so badly want to get done.
“That’s the reason why I came back — because I wanted to be on [this] team,” said Smith, the Big Ten Preseason Player of the Year. “We’ve got a great group to [go and] accomplish something like that.”
