March blandness

And now, on the morning after Kobe Bryant won an Oscar (for Short Animated Film) and then dunked over right-wing harpy/sports illiterate Laura Ingraham with a cutting reference to her "shut up and dribble" dismissal of basketball players ...

The Blob again refuses to offer a dismissal of its own.

In other words, I still believe Purdue has the ingredients to be a Final Four team, despite losing badly to Michigan in the Big Ten Tournament finale, an outcome virtually everyone should have seen coming.

But I also believe this: It has no chance if it continues to play the way it has for the last month.

In what's become a recurring theme, big man Isaac Haas carried the load again for the Boilermakers, scoring 23 points and taking eight rebounds. And once again he got little help from the rest of a lineup that's gone mostly dark after lighting it up for the first three months of the season.

While Michigan sophomore Zavier Simpson -- the best perimeter player on the floor by miles and miles Sunday -- zipped over, around and through them at will, the Boilermakers' previously impeccable perimeter players came up empty again. The Edwards duo, Carsen and Vince, combined for just 16 points on 6-of-22 shooting. Carsen Edwards, who'd scored 53 points in the tournament's first two games, was shut down by Simpson and Co., going for just 12 on 4-of-16 misfiring. As a team, the Boilers, once perhaps the best 3-point shooting team in the country, missed 13 of 17 from the arc.

That is not going to get the Purdues anywhere a week-and-a-half from now. It might not even get them out of the first weekend of the Madness.

They're a devastating inside-out team when right, as they pretty much were all through November, December and January. But when the Edwardses and Dakota Mathias can't throw it in the ocean from a rowboat, they're easily defendable. Teams can collapse on Haas with impunity, knowing Purdue's shooters aren't going to make them pay on the kick-out. Or they can let Haas get his and simply take away everything else, as has been alarmingly easy the last month.

At the opposite end of that spectrum is Michigan, which was playing the best basketball in the Big Ten coming into New York and thus shocked no one by winding up the last man standing. They beat the Big Ten's presumptive Big Two, Michigan State and Purdue, back-to-back by 11 and nine points, respectively. Don't be stunned if the Wolverines duplicate last year, when they reached the Sweet Sixteen after again catching fire late.

As they say, timing is everything. Purdue was the best team in the Big Ten two months ago. Michigan and Michigan State are the best teams in the conference now. And a week-and-a-half from now?

Maybe Purdue can give us January in March. And maybe it will only give us Purdue in March.

History doesn't have much good to say about the latter.