Lost Tuesday

 Well, I know what I'm going to do, on this morning after. I'm going to fire up "Hoosiers" again to reassure myself Indiana is still The Basketball State.

Because last night it wasn't.

First there was No. 1 Purdue, journeying out to Nebraska and getting whupped from stem to stern by a football school. Which apparently is now a basketball school because the Cornhuskers are 13-3 now and have one of the best guards in the Big Ten in Keisei Tominaga, who dropped 19 on the Boilermakers in a 16-point win.

Purdue got way behind, got back within one, fell back again, and got close again. Then the Boilers got outscored 20-4 down the stretch because Nebraska shot a ridiculous 60.9 percent from the 3-point arc (14-of-23), and also because Zach Edey and Co. didn't dominate the glass like they should have, outrebounding the Nebraskas just 34-30.

The Blob's take on this?

Nebraska probably isn't going to shoot 70 percent from the arc again -- heck, who will? -- so chalk this one up to Purdue losing to a rare phenomenon. Like, you know,  Halley's Comet beats the Boilers or something.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast ...

Yikes, Indiana. Just yikes.

The Hoosiers reprised their own Nebraska trip with a listless 66-57 loss to a supremely underwhelming Rutgers team. Again the Indiana guards were trash; the Hoosiers turned it over 18 times, which means between the Nebraska loss and this one they kicked away the Magic Orange Sphere a mind-boggling 37 times. Thirty ... seven ... times.

Not content with that bit of basketball vandalism, they also shot horribly, missing 19 of their 26 3-point attempts (26.9 percent) and 35 of their 58 shots overall (39.7). Oh, and point guard Xavier Johnson, Indiana's sixth-year alleged floor leader, got kicked out of the game for groin-shotting a Rutgers player -- but not before he'd scored just two points, dished just two assists and turned it over five times in 24 minutes.

The cherry on top was head coach Mike Woodson killing another Indiana lead with that stupid hockey-line-change mass substitution thing, then getting all defensive about it in the postgame.

"I'm not going to sit here and answer that question when it comes to the fans -- or you," Woodson said to a reporter who asked about it.

Wonderful.

The upshot of all this is some people are beginning to whisper the dread words "Archie Miller" about Woodson's regime. Indiana fans have always been a touch divorced from reality ("We won our last national title a thousand years ago, so we're an ELITE program!"), which is not good news for Woodson. Putting a showing like last night's out there is only going to make them louder and more insistent that, like everyone who's come after Bob Knight, he's just not That Guy.

In the meantime, I've got "Hoosiers" to console me.

I mean, Jimmy Chitwood never hit a guy in the nuts. So there's that.