Matt Painter wanders over during a break in a Purdue practice with a confession. For the last few minutes, as his Boilermakers ran through drills, he was not thinking about their next opponent.<\/p>\n
Now in his defense, he\u2019s already devoted plenty of brain matter to the Penn State cause. Sitting in a hotel ballroom an hour or so earlier, he pulled out a stack of legal-sized papers, some attached to the pad and some not, all filled with longhand notes. He\u2019d also reviewed game film, relentlessly harping on defending Nittany Lions star guard Jalen Pickett.<\/p>\n
Just now, though, as his Boilers started the actual business of prepping for Penn State, Painter has been fixated on the Phillies \u2013 the mid-to-late 1970s Phillies lineup to be exact. Which only makes sense if you understand how Matt Painter\u2019s mind works. It is a cyclone, simultaneously spinning and hoovering everything in its orbit. He does not simply meander down rabbit holes; he burrows deep into them, creating off-shooting tunnels that zig and zag so far from the core it takes some unspooling to remember what it was he was intrigued about in the first place.<\/p>\n
Case in point: His arrival at the virtual Phillies baseball diamond began with a conversation about a slow-footed basketball diehard in Indiana who fell in love with high-flying Julius Erving and the Sixers. That became relevant only because the Boilermakers are playing Penn State in Philly, and happen to be using the Sixers\u2019 training facility in Camden, N.J., for practice. And on the walls of said facility hang banners commemorating the 76ers\u2019 retired jerseys, including, of course, Erving. That hall of honor also includes Hal Greer, Billy Cunningham, Bobby Jones, Wilt Chamberlain, Maurice Cheeks, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Dolph Schayes, Moses Malone and announcer Dave Zinkoff. And because he can, Painter runs through each, reciting the hometown, high school and college for each. \u201cExcept Moses,\u2019\u2019 he says. \u201cMoses Malone. College: none.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those great Sixers got Painter to thinking about his other love, baseball, and how good the Phillies were in the late 1970s. So naturally, his mind starts churning and he\u2019s trying to remember the Phillies\u2019 manager. \u201cDanny something,\u2019\u2019 he says. Painter remains stumped long enough that communications director Chris Forman comes to his aid, searching on his phone for the answer \u2013 \u201cDanny Ozark,\u2019\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight, Danny Ozark,\u2019\u2019 Painter says, and then he meanders onto the court and practice begins.<\/p>\n
Figuring out Ozark does not close the shut-off valve in Painter\u2019s head. Instead, it opens the floodgates, and as the Boilermakers ran through drills Painter could only think about Ozark, and by extension, who was on those Phillies teams. Now that he has it, he has to share it. \u201cLuzinski, Bowa, Boone, Carlton,\u2019\u2019 he starts rattling off before smiling at his own inanity. \u201cI\u2019m like a little kid. I get caught up in trivial things,\u2019\u2019 he says. \u201cI remember weird stuff, and I\u2019m curious about stuff that doesn\u2019t matter. Like how do you hit a baseball? I don\u2019t play golf, but how can you hit a golf ball that far? I\u2019m just naturally curious, but I\u2019m especially curious about things that are hard.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
College basketball is hard right now. Not merely the traditional chore of being good at it. Solving the riddle of the current state of affairs is tricky: NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment, NCAA Tournament expansion, cheating, agents, rules, enforcement, leadership, Power 5, mid majors, low majors, parity, equity and governance.<\/p>\n
People are pleased that a committee has pitched and the NCAA has approved a restructuring that will allow each sport to run its own little fiefdom under the overarching NCAA umbrella. They remain understandably skeptical, though, about how it will actually work and more importantly, who will be in charge. The dysfunction did not entirely run off Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jay Wright and now Mike Brey, but it\u2019s a contributor. Yet their absence has left college basketball in a four-corners stall, searching for new leaders. The 78-year-old Jim Boeheim cannot, in theory, coach forever, and Tom Izzo, at 67, is on the backside of his career.<\/p>\n
Which is where the beautiful mind of Matt Painter comes in.<\/p>\n
Painter, 52, isn\u2019t the obvious name as a possible heir to the college leadership throne. He does not have the gravitas of some of his more high-profile peers. He hasn\u2019t won a championship. Hasn\u2019t even made a Final Four, as desperate Purdue fans know all too well. He\u2019s not a carnival barker or a media darling.<\/p>\n
Yet it\u2019s that very steadiness that makes him so appealing. He\u2019s in the weeds already, on the men\u2019s basketball oversight committee, the one-time transfer committee, the NABC board of directors, USA Basketball\u2019s selection committee for the U18 team and more subcommittees than he can remember. Consensus in a sport that includes 368 teams, many of which have little in common save the 94 feet of court, seems like a fairy tale, and trying to push the NCAA, which rolls on square wheels, is beyond Sisyphean. Plenty have tried \u2013 Brey served as the NABC president; Krzyzewski used his final Final Four news conferences as a pulpit to express his exasperation; Izzo has vented to the point of near combustion. Painter quietly plugs away. \u201cMatt has the personality, the temperament, and the sense of humor you need in these positions,\u2019\u2019 says Craig Robinson, the NABC executive director. \u201cMost of all, he has the willingness to stick with it. There are a lot of people who are fed up with the way things are run, but you\u2019ve got to be persistent and you\u2019ve got to be resilient. Matt\u2019s not going to pick up his ball and go home.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Nor is he, despite his friendly Midwestern ways, a pushover. He has his peers\u2019 trust because they believe he\u2019s on the straight and narrow; he has their respect because they know he\u2019s not afraid to fight for what he views as lopsided, if not downright foolish. Painter questioned the new NCAA siloing system, agreeing with it in principle, but worrying about Olympic sports budgets if the moneymakers of basketball and football get to essentially govern themselves. As a member of the one-time transfer committee, he\u2019s zinged his colleagues about perhaps renaming it the three-time transfer committee. He has no problem with the NIL, but can\u2019t believe the NCAA drug its feet so long that it failed to establish rules around it that has allowed for bedlam. Asked to consider things from his Power 5 perspective, he\u2019s always quick to push back about what will happen to the low and mid majors.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of the NCAA, our system is broken,\u2019\u2019 he says bluntly. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of good, quality people there, but the fact that they\u2019ve let it get to this point, where we\u2019re making decisions on what\u2019s best for student-athletes because of court costs and fear of litigation, how did we let it get to this? \u201c<\/p>\n
Painter will be the first to admit he\u2019s not quite sure how he got here, to this sort of guardian of the game position. Even after 18 years on the job at Purdue, he sometimes still feels like he\u2019s babysitting Gene Keady\u2019s program. The passage of time has something to do with that. Stick around long enough and people inevitably listen to what you have to say. But just because a clock moves and years pass doesn\u2019t mean a person grows. Years ago Painter read a book by Bill Bradley and one line stuck with him. Asked how he could hit a bank shot without seeing the goal, the Princeton star turned NBA player turned senator replied, \u201cyou have to have a sense of where you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fifteen, even 10 years ago, Matt Painter was more like the guy throwing the metaphorical ball blindly at the backboard and hoping it went in. Now he\u2019s more like his star player, Zach Edey. When he throws the ball up, it\u2019s more than likely going in the right direction. \u201cWe all hope to grow and evolve, right?\u201d says Purdue assistant coach Paul Lusk, who worked alongside Painter in his first six years at Purdue, and then returned to the staff last season. \u201cThat\u2019s Matt. He\u2019s just figured out who he is.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Painter is not exactly an enigma. He likes basketball. He likes baseball. He enjoys a good book, but finds self-help books repetitive and boring. A good day includes a nap, a Cubs game and maybe some grilling. He owns a lake house and all of the toys, but he has no clue how to drive the two Jet Skis that sit at his dock. He prefers legal-sized paper because his dad, an attorney, always had the pads around the house, but he doesn\u2019t have a filing system, and his wallet is from the George Costanza collection.<\/p>\n
He grew up in Indiana, where loving basketball is a genetic trait. His dad, Mike, put a full-size court, complete with floodlights, in the backyard, Muncie\u2019s own field of dreams minus the cornfields. Painter recognized early that his intellect was his athletic ticket, and he learned to think the game as much as play it. He also was a \u201cbut why\u201d kid, constantly thirsting for answers.<\/p>\n
Painter figures much of the need to know that has served him so well as an adult came from being the byproduct of the \u201cbecause I told you so\u201d generation of parenting. Painter\u2019s dad was not what you would call an oversharer. It wasn\u2019t until just recently, when he went to his father\u2019s high school alma mater in Fort Wayne to recruit Keion Brooks, that Painter learned the full extent of his dad\u2019s sports achievements. Killing time, Painter wandered the hallways and checked out the trophy cases at North Side High. Sitting front and center in a picture of the 1962 state championship-winning track team and holding the trophy \u2013 Mike Painter. Painter called his dad, curious as to why he hadn\u2019t ever mentioned it. \u201cYou never asked,\u2019\u2019 Mike said. Painter laughs as he shares the story. \u201cSounds just like me, doesn\u2019t it? If I won a state championship, I would have been at the mall handing out flyers.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
As a young coach, Painter didn\u2019t initially understand how to package his own curiosity for the betterment of his team. He took over at Purdue at age 35, named the coach-in-waiting the year prior to smooth what otherwise could have been a messy exodus with Gene Keady. Painter had paid his dues. His first job was as a D3 assistant at Washington and Jefferson College, where he worked the offseason as a forklift operator at a Coca-Cola plant and in season sold ads for the game programs to supplement his income, and as Bruce Weber\u2019s assistant at Southern Illinois, shared a one-bedroom apartment with fellow assistant, Alan Major.<\/p>\n
But he also had but one year of head coaching experience when he took over a Big Ten program that had deteriorated in Keady\u2019s final years. It takes time to carve \u2013 and trust \u2013 your own coaching identity. Early on Painter mimicked Keady\u2019s way. In the preseason, the Boilermakers would follow Keady\u2019s old-school conditioning drills: timed mile runs, two and two-and-a-half-mile runs through campus, two weeks of alternating days running the football stadium steps and 220-yard sprints at the indoor track facility, followed by timed sprints up and down the basketball court. \u201cIt was absolutely archaic,\u2019\u2019 says Big Ten analyst Robbie Hummel, who played for Painter from 2007 to 2012. \u201cI\u2019d look at E\u2019Twaun Moore and we\u2019d be like, \u2018What are we doing?\u2019 But that\u2019s just what he knew. That\u2019s how he did things as a player. He was still trying to find himself.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
For years, Painter followed that plan \u2013 doing what he thought he was supposed to do, rather than what he wanted to do. He coached hard and chased the players he thought elite programs were meant to chase, fit be damned. It worked until it didn\u2019t. The Boilermakers made the NCAA Tournament in six of Painter\u2019s first seven years, and then skidded to back-to-back sub-.500 seasons in 2013 and 2014.<\/p>\n
Much has been written about Painter\u2019s sort of epiphany \u2013 how he stopped targeting who he thought he should recruit and instead went after who he wanted; his decision to bring personality testing into his program to better understand players\u2019 motivations and to help them better understand him \u2013 but the real pivot was an internal reconciliation. Painter finally found the confidence to be the coach he wanted to be. \u201cYou have winning and you have misery,\u2019\u2019 he says. \u201cThere\u2019s an element of misery that comes from losing. There just is. When people talk about all of these criteria to evaluate in recruiting, well I want to be able to enjoy ourselves, too. I want to have some fun.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Purdue is now made in his likeness \u2013 offensive-minded, with players who are passionate, hard-working and above all else, cerebral. Painter tells them what they\u2019re doing, but also why they\u2019re doing it. He\u2019s directness can still be cutting, but he tells his players that what he says to their face is what he would say behind their back.<\/p>\n
In Hummel\u2019s playing days, a furious Painter would almost daily throw the ball as hard as he could at the backboard. Granted it didn\u2019t always work \u2013 \u201chalf the time, it would bounce off the side and ricochet, and we\u2019d have to try not to laugh,\u2019\u2019 Hummel says \u2013 but the message was delivered. Practice was not meant to be enjoyable. Now when he comes to practice, Hummel watches the coaching staff explain and explain some more and laughs. \u201cAre you guys gonna start?\u201d he yells.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t fly everywhere. Some players get bored talking about basketball and just want to go, less interested in the nuances of schemes and preferring to just improvise. That was never Painter, and thereby it is not Purdue. It is no accident that since Painter found himself, found his sense of where he is, Purdue has played in the last seven NCAA Tournaments, reaching four Sweet 16s and one Elite Eight. \u201cYou go through some struggles and you just need players,\u2019\u2019 Lusk says. \u201cYou wind up going against your instinct. Now with Matt, that\u2019s never going to happen. He\u2019s so secure in who he is, and so established.\u201d<\/p>\n
This particular version of the Boilermakers might be the most like Painter. No five stars, not even any obvious NBA players (for all his skills, the 7-4 Edey does not fit the current NBA system). Per CBB Analytics, Purdue\u2019s offense ranks in the 98th percentile, its assist rate is in the 87th percentile and turnover rate in the 91st. Last year\u2019s squad, with Trevion Williams and Jaden Ivey, had more talent; this one feels more connected \u2013 to each other and to Painter.<\/p>\n
After the Boilers dropped their only game this season, to Rutgers, Painter debated between going hard at them or being patient. Hummel remembers after a disappointing loss to Oklahoma in 2008, Painter shocked everybody in the locker room by applauding their effort, only to return to practice the day after and lose his mind. \u201cHe went back and watched the film, and he was furious,\u2019\u2019 Hummel says. \u201cOne of the hardest practices we had. We were all like, \u2018what the hell just happened?\u201d<\/p>\n
This time, he chose patience. \u201cYou know you don\u2019t always have to deliver the message,\u2019\u2019 Painter says. \u201cNot everything needs to be said to the whole group. You need to talk to Fletcher Loyer about Fletcher Loyer sometimes. Not everyone has to hear it. I think you can be direct with them without crushing them.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
No. 1 Purdue hasn\u2019t lost since.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n\n (Rich Graessle \/ Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Every summer, former Florida assistant coach Larry Shyatt hosts a clinic in Gainesville. For three days, coaches open their playbooks, following Shyatt\u2019s simple edict: \u201cIf you\u2019re not willing to share, this isn\u2019t for you.\u2019\u2019 Painter, who first attended as a young assistant looking to network and learn the business, returns every year. It suits his nerdy fixation on college basketball and helps satiate his endless quest for knowledge.<\/p>\n
Yet every summer some established coach, a former regular when he was on the come, stops showing up. \u201cThat amazes me,\u2019\u2019 Painter says. \u201cLike you\u2019ve won a little, and now you\u2019ve got it all figured out? You never complete the puzzle.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Painter can\u2019t imagine having it all figured out. He wants solutions for college basketball and perfection for Purdue, but he also knows that neither is necessarily attainable.\u00a0And so Matt Painter searches, constantly and feverishly, his mind spinning with the childhood facts he memorized, and the adult information he still craves.<\/p>\n
It is a beautiful thing.<\/p>\n
(Illustration: Sean Reilly \/ <\/em>The Athletic; photos: Ben Solomon, Stacy Revere \/ Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n