Purdue defeats Bama

Purdue 73, Alabama 65

Alabama won a Heisman Trophy on Saturday night, but not an intersectional Division I-A men's basketball game. The Purdue Boilermakers staggered at times in the face of Alabama's pressure defense, but a veteran team showed why it has the makings of a Final Four squad.

This tussle in Tuscaloosa, Ala., against a young and hungry Crimson Tide crew represented Purdue's first true road game after a full month of basketball. The season is well underway at this point, yet the Boilermakers hadn't yet tested the waters in a genuinely hostile environment. With a Coleman Coliseum crowd energized by Mark Ingram's Heisman victory - announced roughly 10 minutes before tip-off - Alabama owned a considerable amount of electricity and forward momentum, enough - at any rate - to storm the palace gate and get Coach Matt Painter's pupils on their heels.

Alabama 's defense was so imposing in the first half that Purdue scored only one bucket in a span of eight minutes and 55 seconds. With just over six minutes remaining before halftime, the lads from West Lafayette, Ind., were staring at a 24-13 deficit. Bama took a 37-28 halftime lead and extended its advantage to 53-38 with 14:16 left in regulation. Purdue's 8-0 start was all well and good, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that a foremost Big Ten contender just didn't have its best fastball on a night when football news propelled a basketball crowd to give its Bama boys some extra emotional juice. College basketball powers always run into some tricky road games when the stars just don't align themselves favorably, and when coach Anthony Grant guided his Tide to a 15-point lead near the 14-minute mark of the second half, Purdue partisans had to be ready to accept the notion that this was just not their night.

The black-shirted stalwarts on the court, however, were possessed of sterner stuff. No loss - and no unfortunate convergence of circumstances - would be meekly accepted this evening by Purdue's hard-nosed hoopsters.

If Alabama threw some big-league defense at the Boilers in the first half, the men from the Midwest would answer with their own stern show of resistance in the stretch run of this showdown. After Bama gained its 15-point margin roughly six minutes into the second half, Purdue clamped down on the Crimson Tide, limiting Grant's group to just three made field goals in the final 14 minutes. Even more amazingly, Purdue didn't allow a single field goal - not one - in the final 8:48 of action, as the Tide wilted in the face of tenacious pressure from Chris Kramer (who had three steals in the game) and the rest of a roster that used its defensive dominance to set up easy baskets in transition.

Two of Kramer's steals came in a three-possession sequence late in the game, and proved to be central in determining the ultimate outcome. The first Kramer theft led to a breakaway layup that gave Purdue a 67-64 lead with 4:13 left. The second steal-score combo from Kramer gave the visitors a 69-64 cushion at the 2:34 mark. A Tide team clearly flustered by the abrupt and substantial shift in momentum was never able to pull within one possession of the lead after Kramer's pair of consequential defense-to-offense displays. The night began with Alabama's football program basking in the bright light of gridiron glory, but it ended with Purdue silencing the Tide on the basketball court.

Yes, Purdue will play teams far more accomplished than Alabama as this season continues. Nevertheless, this gritty second-half comeback shows that the Boilermakers - even in moments of struggle and strain - will always have the ability to reverse their on-court fortunes. They'll be a very tough out for anyone they face over the next four months.

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