Kenny Thompson

Zach Edey’s place among the all-time greatest to play basketball at Purdue was cemented Tuesday by winning his sixth and final 2022-23 National Player of the Year honor, the Wooden Award. Whether Edey supplants All-American Joe Barry Carroll as the Boilermakers’ center on an all-time team will be left to others. Some will want to…

As a Chicago Cubs fan, Matt Painter is well aware how many times “wait ‘til next year” was uttered by the Wrigley faithful between 1909 and 2015. Millions of Cubs fans went to their graves without seeing their team attain baseball’s version of the Promised Land, a World Series championship. Today, Purdue basketball fans are…

With Ryan Walters’ first spring practices as Purdue’s head football coach under way, let’s continue our look back at his predecessors. Purdue’s football fortunes waxed and waned in the first quarter of the 20th century, a direct result of the coaching hires made until James Phelan – a member of the College Football Hall of…

The national media is suffering from a case of selective amnesia. That’s the diagnosis from your friendly neighborhood basketball doctor, who watched hours of NCAA Tournament selection analysis this week. “Duke is a bad matchup for Purdue, especially in Madison Square Garden,” the drum beat begins. “Marquette is the kind of team that gives Purdue…

Time will tell where the 2023 Big Ten champion Purdue men’s basketball team ranks among the school’s 24 other title squads. Purdue’s 25 championships are the most in conference history, three more than Indiana and five better than Wisconsin and Ohio State. Here’s one man’s rankings of the previous 24 Boilermaker Big Ten championship teams.…

During the early days of college football, most coaches had other occupations. No, nothing like those cheesy insurance commercials that fatten the bank accounts of Alabama’s Nick Saban and new Colorado coach Deion Sanders. Take Purdue’s first coach in 1887. For the princely sum of “$1 per lesson,” 23-year-old Albert Berg was charged with preparing…

Media reports indicate the Big Ten Conference’s top officials will meet sometime this month to work out plans for football schedules in 2024 and beyond. It’s not going to be as simple as plugging in new members USC and UCLA alongside Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern and Wisconsin in the West while shifting Purdue to…

Two former Purdue standouts who skipped the Citrus Bowl game ostensibly to avoid injury and improve their NFL prospects succeeded on the first goal but their professional outlook doesn’t seem to have changed significantly. Quarterback Aidan O’Connell is projected to be a mid-to-late Day 3 pick, which ranges from the fourth through seventh rounds, by…

It’s time to issue mid-term grades for Big Ten Conference basketball. Entering the season, Indiana and Illinois were supposed to be teacher’s pets. The Hoosiers’ Trayce Jackson-Davis was the odds-on favorite for Big Ten Player of the Year honors. A funny thing, though, happened on the way to the awards ceremony. The team generally picked…