Matt Painter is in his 20th season as Purdue's men's basketball coach, and next month he'll make his 16th NCAA tournament.
Twenty years is a long time in any context, and in coaching years it's centuries. Within their two decades together, Painter and Purdue have endured plenty of peaks and valleys. After a rebuilding year immediately upon taking the job in 2005-06, Purdue won a tournament game the next two seasons and reached the Sweet 16 in 2009 and 2010, while winning the Big Ten tournament in '09 and sharing a B1G regular season title in '10. Then, Purdue went six straight years without reaching the second weekend and didn't reach the tournament at all in 2013 and '14.
Purdue won eight tournament games from 2017-19, then finished under .500 in 2020 and lost to No. 13-seed North Texas in 20201. In 2023, Purdue became the second program to lose to a No. 16 seed in the Big Dance. They made the championship game the following year.
Through it all, Painter and Purdue have endured. Next month, Painter and the Boilermakers will make the Big Dance, lose sometime between the Round of 64 and the Sweet 16, and run it back for Year 21. And through it all, Painter has watched as his counterpart at arch rival Indiana has come and gone every few years.
IU announced earlier this month that Mike Woodson will not return for a fourth season in 2025-26, meaning that his replacement will be the sixth full-time Head Hoosier that Painter has faced in his years leading Purdue.
Watching with interest from afar, Painter sees a program that doesn't move forward because it's constantly spinning its wheels in the mud.
He also sees a program that listens to the wrong people, and one that wants so badly to be successful that it suffocates the only people who can make that success possible.
"You've got to look at some of the common denominators here, more than anything," Painter said after the Boilermaker and Hoosiers met on Saturday. Ironically, IU won the game, upsetting the 13th-ranked Boilers, 73-58. "Don't beat yourself. Let's support somebody. Try that out every now and then."
"A fan base isn't the people that tweet. A fan base is the people that when you're bleeding, they support you. They jump on and off things way too much. Support your coach, man. Support your players. Don't tweet negative things about 'em. Be supportive. See how that works for you."
Looking back on it now, the sliding doors moment for this era of Indiana basketball was the Tom Crean era. A Michigan native who assisted Tom Izzo at Michigan State and took Marquette to the Final Four, Crean suffered through three losing seasons before taking Indiana to the Sweet 16 in 2012 -- its first in a decade. IU returned the following year. A down year followed in 2014, but the Hoosiers again won an NCAA tournament game in 2015, and returned to the 2016 Sweet 16.
In 2017, Indiana failed to reach the Big Dance, and IU fired Crean two days after losing in the opening round of the NIT. IU has one won NCAA tournament game since. Had Crean not lost to Syracuse as a No. 1 seed in 2013 or to North Carolina as a No. 1 seed in 2016, perhaps Indiana would have had the patience to ride out 2017. Perhaps.
Either way, Indiana has won one NCAA tournament game since -- and it happened last year.
"They build them up, and they overdo things," Painter said. "Don't get recruits (and act) like, 'That's Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.' Well, then they come out here and they're not Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, they're good college players. They build it up and then they go, 'What's wrong?'"
"It's hard for young people to hear all that and then go out and collectively play well. 'We're playing for you guys but you dog us when we lose and then we're the best when we win.' It's somewhere in between right?"
Those two habits are two sides of the same coin, in Painter's view. The fan base -- or, a vocal portion of the fan base -- has a desire to win that so suffocating it consumes the entire program that it swallows its players and coaches whole.
"I think they need to learn from some of that. Support the new coach, support the staff, but also be grounded with everything and I think they'll be able to have success."
Rarely do you hear a coach discuss a job opening -- let alone at a rival -- as candidly as Painter did. His diagnosis of Indiana's problems has lessons for everyone.