Purdue is in first, a place few would have thought it would be.
Nobody maybe.
And thus, with a showdown at conference favorite Ohio State at 2 p.m. Sunday, the Boilermakers aren’t feeling any heat, not one bit.
“There’s no pressure at all,” junior Ashley Morrissette said. “There’s no pressure at all.”
True. Purdue’s arguably ahead of schedule, sitting 14-2 overall, 5-0 in the Big Ten, a game clear of Ohio State and Maryland in the conference standings. A win Sunday in Columbus – it would be an upset – would put Purdue two games clear of the No. 5 Buckeyes (12-4, 4-1). Even with a loss, the Boilermakers would remain in first, although in a tie.
“We don’t have pressure,” Coach Sharon Versyp said. “Everybody else has the pressure. We don’t at all. And so we’re playing with more fire, more loose, more confident. We’re not out there worrying about things.
“So when you’re the underdog and being the hunter, it’s a little bit easier than being the hunted and knowing that you have to win every night because that’s what the gods say. That’s how it should be, we’ve won five games but there’s 13 to go. Anything can happen.”
Purdue has proven that. The Boilermakers are winning, in many ways, because of their versatility. They’ve shown they can win defensive struggles, like wins over Michigan and Indiana in which they scored only in the mid-60s. But perhaps most surprisingly, they’ve been able to ratchet up the scoring, too, hitting plus 80 against Northwestern and Minnesota.
“I think one of the biggest things is that depending on who we play, we can flat out play defense and grind it out, do some great things, then there’s some other games that we can score like everybody else, so that’s the good thing,” said Versyp, whose team has won nine straight. “Sometimes, when you’re looking at ‘Oh, you can’t score, you can’t score.’ Well, two games we’ve put 80 points up. That’s probably the thing that we know we wanted to do and the thing I’m excited about.”
Purdue will likely have to score against Ohio State. The Buckeyes, who have the league’s first- and ninth-leading scorers in guards Kelsey Mitchell (25.2) and Ameryst Alston (18.4), average a Big Ten-best 86.2 points per game.
“They want to push the tempo, want you to take quick shots and miss,” Versyp said, “and they want to score 100 points. We have to really set the tone and the tempo. We want to run, but if we don’t have a great shot, we want to slow things down and find the best shot we possibility can have. And we’ve done that at times, but we don’t want to get in a track meet with them.”
The game could be a good matchup of guards, with Mitchell and Alston matching up against Purdue’s Morrissette and April Wilson. The Boilermaker duo doesn’t score at as high a rate, combining for about 27 per game, but they might be better defensively.
“This will be one of our toughest defensive assignments,” said Morrissette, an Ohio native. “That’s probably going to be really emphasized, even though it already is (at Purdue, with) ‘Defense lives here.’ But we have to make sure it lives at Ohio State too.”
The Boilermakers are living in the moment – and it’s a big moment right now – but so far they’ve not let those get to them. At critical moments within games, they’ve been able to battle back, like when they trailed late at Michigan or after Minnesota made a big late-third quarter run on Thursday night.
Morrissette repeatedly said Friday that the Boilermakers are taking things a game at a time, a sports cliché that’s frequently said and infrequently believed. But for Purdue, it seems legit. She has reason to believe it, because last season, the Boilermakers started to crumble and they couldn’t recover.
“We definitely look one game at a time, especially coming from last year,” Morrissette said. “You have to, because you never know when the tides can change. And we just want to make sure that everything that we can control is controlled.
“It’s a great opportunity (Sunday), starting 5-0 is something that a lot of people didn’t foresee for us, but our preseason and our postseason after last year, that hard work is paying off.”
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