Purdue Basketball to Face West Virginia

Head Coach Matt Painter always likes to challenge his team in the non-conference season. Even during exhibition games Painter likes to throw challenges at his team. In recent years as teams have gone to one less exhibition game and one “secret” scrimmage Purdue has played West Virginia because Painter and Huggy Bear seem to enjoy coaching against one another. Well, the two will meet in the regular season, as announced today, as part of the Phil Knight Legacy tournament.

West Virginia will join other notable non-conference opponents Marquette, (likely) Gonzaga, and Florida State. I say likely for Gonzaga because it is contingent on the above listed tournament bracket. That’s a healthy non-conference schedule right there. It should give us a good idea of what this team is capable of by the time we get into Big Ten season.

These teams have not played one another since 2013. The two teams played in back to back seasons meaning they saw each other twice within a 12 month period. Purdue walked away the victor of both of these games and currently sits at 4-1 overall based on stats provided by Purdue.

As noted in the tweet above, this game will tipoff at 10:00 PM eastern. Given that this is a Phil Knight Legacy game that makes sense because the game will be played on the West Coast (despite what Juan would have you believe, not the best coast).

This will be a Thanksgiving day special so before you go out the next day for Black Friday go easy on the turkey because you don’t want that tryptophan to hit you and put you out on the couch before tipoff. In fact, you could pull a 4th meal situation here and have yourself a nice plate of leftovers as you stay up until midnight watching Purdue basketball.

This is shaping up to be quite the non-conference season for Purdue and given the transition that Purdue finds itself in it should make it interesting to say the least. Lots of pieces need to be filled in for Purdue. They will have to hit the ground running. It’s great to be included in events like this and I hope Purdue can comport themselves well. From a recruiting standpoint things like this do help.

This is one of the last pieces of scheduling we have been waiting on. I expect the full schedule to be released in the near future.