WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The school with the $13 million football coach was in town Friday night to play a basketball game. Yeah, Indiana was on top of the world in Hard Rock Stadium in January, but what about March?
At the moment, that’s a growing TBD. Much more of Friday night — Purdue 93, Indiana 64 — and it’ll be welcome to the bubble, Hoosiers.
Here’s what we know about Indiana basketball to the moment.
The Hoosiers are 17-10. To put that in 2025-26 language in Bloomington — where a Curt Cignetti coup has suddenly made his shoulder-padded sport king — that’s one more win than the football team but 10 more losses.
They have been considered safely in the bracket, seeded in the 9 or 10 range. But this makes seven defeats in the past 12 games, five of them by at least 14 points. They just lost to Illinois by 20 and were down 34 at Purdue. In those two games they were ahead for two minutes and 18 seconds and their biggest lead was two points.
Not competitive, in other words. “We’ve got to let those go,” coach Darian DeVries was saying amid Friday’s debris. Their bid is not in serious trouble yet but this is hardly an encouraging trend. They are in 10th place in the Big Ten and had they not recently escaped UCLA and Wisconsin each by one point in overtime, things would really be getting dicey. They are 2-9 currently in Quad 1 games on the NCAA’s NET-o-meter.
RANKINGS: The latest DI men’s basketball NET rankings
As guard Lamar Wilkerson said the other day “We got a lot of things that we got to go back to the drawing board and fix, but that just opened our eyes and let us know that, hey, we got to be a lot better to play in this league and to get to March Madness, punch that ticket.”
In this magical Indiana year with a football national championship banner to hang and the 50th anniversary of basketball’s last unbeaten team to celebrate, how ironic would it be to entirely miss the show next month? Part of the Hoosiers’ blueblooded legacy is playing in 41 NCAA tournaments. Only six programs have been to more. But that moniker is getting dated. They have only seen two brackets of the past eight. They have won two tournament games since 2016. Purdue has won 16.
DeVries was brought in to change that and his first edition has had its strong nights. But Friday was an absolute shredding. Biggest Purdue win over Indiana since 1969. The Boilermakers peppered the Hoosiers with a 64.7 field goal percentage and tore through the last 30 minutes without missing two shots in a row. Given that, what Indiana did on offense didn’t much matter. Not even Wilkerson scoring 18 points the second half, leaving his Big Ten average at 23.9, which is on pace to be the Hoosiers’ highest conference mark in 55 years. With just over eight minutes left in the game, Indiana was shooting a torrid 54.1 percent and was still down 25 points. The Hoosiers had one offensive rebound all night. Wilkerson finished with 20 points but it took 25 minutes to make his first basket.
“Nights like these are hard,” DeVries said. “It seemed like they had an answer for whatever we did.”
And yet at this crucial hour, Indiana has a good friend. It’s the schedule.
MARCH MADNESS: Andy Katz’s latest NCAA tournament predictions
The Hoosiers are 13-2 in Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall and that’s where they’ll be the next three games. Northwestern, Michigan State, Minnesota. Three-game homestands during conference play are not all that common, and this one might be the season-at-a-crossroads elixir Indiana needs, putting the Hoosiers in the right place at the right time after being thoroughly State Farm Centered at Illinois and Mackey Arenaed here. “These kind of environments present a challenge. We’ve got a similar advantage at our place,” DeVries said. “We’ve got to go home and take advantage of being at home now.”
After that comes a regular season finale at Ohio State. The Hoosiers might not need all of them but very likely needs most of them.
“We’re playing for a lot right now,” forward Tucker DeVries said. “There’s not much we can do right now about the previous game, but we can learn from it and move on to the next one to get ready for these next four games that are massive for us.”
That’s what his father, the coach, was thinking, too. “It’s right here. It’s that stretch run right now,” Darian DeVries said. “The only thing that matters is your next one.”
It was a night for the Mackey Arena crowd to be loud and happy, mindful no doubt that Indiana upset Purdue in Bloomington in January. Also just across the street at Ross-Ade Stadium, the football Hoosiers had buried the Boilermakers 56-3 in November.
Oh, the mushroom cloud that was Indiana karma back then. The dreamland to come. The basketball Hoosiers could use some of that now. To all the nouveau college football faithful in their crimson Indiana national championship shirts, who are already worried about finding a new quarterback at spring practice, this is a reminder that Selection Sunday is three weeks away. And the bubble beckons.
