Where has the rivalry gone?

I was sitting in my first (well, only) class of the day today, looking at the campus newspaper, and I noticed something: The paper had a huge story on football recruiting, some other story and then, finally, a small story on the Purdue-IU rivalry at the bottom of the page. Actually, I hesitate to even call it a story on the rivalry. It was more the story you’ve read 1,000 times with players/coaches saying “it’ll be intense.”

As I gathered myself, talked to the people around me and started thinking about it, it actually started to make sense to me. The people that are currently freshman at Purdue, who I’ll assume are 18 and were born in 1993. If you estimate that they started watching basketball seriously at the earliest 2002-03 (and that’s a stretch), Purdue and Indiana have only even been in the NCAA tournament at the same time three years. Bob Knight was already gone from IU and Gene Keady’s time was quickly coming to a close.

(More after the jump.)

During the time since IU reached the national championship in 2002, Purdue and Indiana have each had a three year stretch of horrible teams (six years total). There were also a couple years in there where the teams met only one time per season, which happened to be right around the only time during that stretch that both teams were actually decent.

Sadly, this is basically the sole “highlight” from those meetings, if you even want to consider it a highlight:

That hardly stacks up with anything from the rivalry’s past, including these memorable Bob Knight clips (second one NSFW-language):

When I kept talking to the people in my class I found out just one of the eight people sitting around me knew, for example, that Purdue and Indiana were the top two in Big Ten in terms of number of Big Ten titles won. Every one of them knew about Knight’s famous chair toss, but only two knew that he threw the chair when IU was playing Purdue. Heck, most of them couldn’t even remember when IU last beat Purdue in Mackey (though, thanks to Carl Landry’s free throw shooting, it wasn’t too long ago).

Rivalries become heated, like Purdue/IU USED to be, because of several factors, with frequency of meetings and both teams being good being the two most important factors. This is why I believe more current Purdue students would actually consider Michigan State a bigger rival than Indiana, simply because they don’t remember Indiana being good. For Purdue, pllaying IU in basketball today is the equivalent of Notre Dame playing Purdue in football – there is no winning. If you win, you were supposed to. If you lose… well, let’s not go there.

This is why I’ve been loving Indiana’s recent “resurgence” of late (if that’s what you want to call a 2-2 record in the last four games). I love that they’re starting to feel like they’re good again. I love that they’re storming the court in Assembly Hall and having parties in the South Lobby. I WANT them to think they’re good, I WANT them to think they have a chance at beating Purdue. Heck, I want them to think they have more than a chance, I want them to think they will, because that is when victory feels best.