Purdue basketball ready for break after frantic Big Ten schedule stretch of 6 games in 16 days

Posted by author January 26, 2025 Basketball

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WEST LAFAYETTE — For Purdue men’s basketball‘s first day off in almost three weeks, Trey Kaufman-Renn planned to prioritize one thing: sleep.

Caleb Furst, similarly, made no plans for Saturday’s long-awaited open spot on the schedule. Maybe grab a coffee and play some video games. The operative word as he looked ahead: “Chill.”

By quirk of the Big Ten schedule, Purdue played six games in a 16-day span, ranging from Rutgers in the east and Washington and Oregon in the west. Its last five games each came with only two days in between. Games rolled into practices which rolled into games and so on.

That’s the life of a college athlete, to some extent. However, having even one occasional day to completely step away from the grind of the season carries obvious benefits. Weekend off days carry even more value, since depending on individual schedules, players might still need to attend class on a weekday.

“It’s nice, obviously not only for the physical break but the mental as well, which I would probably say is even more important,” said Furst, a biomedical health sciences major with medical school in his near future. “Kind of step away from it all, even if it’s just a day, half a day — whatever it may be.”

NCAA regulations require athletes receive at least one day off from countable athletically related activities” in season. However, teams can receive a waiver from those days off in conjunction with a glut of scheduled games as long as athletes receive two days off in the prior or following week.

If that regulation exists, why do teams end up facing that schedule crunch? It’s almost always due to television assignments. Purdue could have given its players a full day off after flying back from Oregon on Jan. 18 if it did not need to play again until Wednesday. Instead, Peacock wanted the home game against Ohio State for Tuesday night.

While that does contribute to the grind, it’s also nice to be wanted. Not every program in the Big Ten has that same cache.

“You fight to have exposure,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “You fight to have success. You fight to have consistent success, because that’s what it is.

“Sometimes it’s a brand that will jump, since it’s the TV people picking the games. … But for the most part, it’s the teams that have had success. They want those big-time matchups.”

Especially now that the Big Ten expanded to 18 teams, and the new logistics required to fold in four West Coast teams, balancing a schedule throughout the season becomes a challenge. For instance, while Purdue has already played 10 Big Ten games, eight league teams had played only eight league games as of Friday night.

That disparity begins to shift this week as Purdue does not play again until 8 p.m. Friday, at home against Indiana. That’s the Boilers’ only game in a 10-day stretch. It also will spend a full two weeks at home before traveling to Iowa on Feb. 3.

Other teams will hit their crunch later in the season. USC concludes the season with six games in 16 days — beginning with a cross-country trip to Maryland and Rutgers. On the plus side for Purdue, it took care of its West Coast trip in the front half of the Big Ten schedule.

“When you’re on road trips, you always feel like you’re on the job, which I’m sure a lot of people in different jobs feel like that, too,” Kaufman-Renn said. “But yeah, it’s gonna feel nice to get a little bit of a break after this game.”

That break came Saturday. We’ll find out Friday whether or not the rejuvenation helped the Boilermakers in their first of two always-intense rivalry games.