Can Purdue’s Elite Senior Trio Break Decades-Long Curse and Claim the National Title?

Having an experienced lineup was long a characteristic of NCAA Tournament teams. With college basketball so different today, Purdue’s Sweet 16 squad stands out: Braden Smith, Fletcher Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn each has at least 145 career games at the school.

In his first game with the Purdue Boilermakers, way back on Nov. 8, 2022, freshman sharpshooter Fletcher Loyer made five 3-pointers. In that same 31-point win over Milwaukee, point guard Braden Smith set a school freshman record with seven steals, while freshman big man Trey Kaufman-Renn added eight points and seven rebounds. 

On Thursday, 1,234 days after they made their Purdue debuts together, the senior trio will take the floor again in the Sweet 16 as the second-seeded Boilermakers take on No. 11 Texas, the lowest seed remaining in the NCAA Tournament, in the West Regional. Not only did they punch their ticket to their third consecutive Sweet 16 appearance with a 79-69 win against Miami (FL) in the second round, but they helped Matt Painter register his 500th win as Purdue’s coach.

In this era of transfers and NIL temptations, seeing three seniors who have played together so long feels exceptionally rare.

“He put a lot of faith in us early on, obviously putting the ball into two freshmen’s hands right away and Trey working his way from being a guy redshirting to come off the bench and now starting and being an All-American,” Loyer said. “Obviously, he put a lot of confidence in us to go out on the court and play. And to be able to get a degree from Purdue and come back for a fourth year and come back and have a chance to do something special with a group of talent, we didn’t really look anywhere else. I think you see a lot of situations where guys go chase money and the grass isn’t always greener. You can learn a lot of values, like Trey said last week, you get a lot of relationships, you learn so much from sticking with a group of guys and dealing with adversity that why would we want to go somewhere else when we have a coach and fanbase and teammates that trust us?”

While NIL-motivated transfers have commonly drawn players away from many schools, Purdue’s focus on retaining players with NIL dollars has been a focus. Daniel Picioski, director of the school’s NIL strategy and player marketing department, said they try to cater NIL opportunities to what the players like. One of those areas has been trading cards, something that began because Smith is a big card collector. Picioski said it also definitely helps that the fanbase has so much familiarity with so many of the players.

“These guys have been here for four years, and I think that also resonates a lot with our fans. In this day and age, you don’t get guys that are here for four years,” Picioski said. “I think our fans are very blessed and appreciative to have these guys who want to be here, so they’re willing to help out and support in any way that they can.”

Experience is the Best Teacher

The trio of Kaufman-Renn, Smith and Loyer has seen the highest highs and lowest lows of March. The last game of their freshman season was a disaster, a loss as a No. 1 seed to No. 16 seed Fairleigh-Dickinson in their NCAA Tournament opener. The very next season, though, they ran through March Madness before falling to a dominant UConn team in the title game. Last year, they lost to a No. 1 seed, Houston, on a last-second bucket in the Sweet 16.

Can they help Purdue get over the hump and win its first national championship in men’s basketball? The Boilermakers don’t have the most talented roster among the 16 teams left in the tournament, but they do have the most experienced core – by far. For starters, all three of those seniors have nine NCAA Tournament wins under their belts.

All three have played at least 145 games in a Purdue uniform. That’s not just unheard of in the NIL era, but historically. In the last 30 seasons, only one NCAA Tournament team – Richmond, in 2022 – has had at least three players with at least 145 games at the same school. Three others were close: North Carolina in 2017, Creighton in 2014 and Ohio in 2013 all had three with at least 140 games.

“Experience is a huge thing, and obviously when you have guys that have made it and played a lot of games in the tournament, it’s easy to help the guys who haven’t,” Smith said. “And I think for us, like, sometimes even we get lost in that and we don’t have that understanding of, like, OK, hey, we gotta focus and relock back in and do those things, especially when it comes to tournament time. So being able to have each other to hold accountable. We also can hold accountable the younger guys and everybody else.”

For some of the elite teams in this era, the goal is to cobble together the most talented roster possible, and sort out roles from there. That doesn’t always work – Kentucky this season is an example of just not having the right puzzle pieces to fit together. But when Painter watches his team on the court, he’s seeing basically what he envisioned in that very first game against Milwaukee in November 2022.

Purdue’s puzzle pieces fit precisely, and not by accident.

Different Roles, Same Mindset

With the Big Ten program, Smith handles and distributes the basketball – he broke Bobby Hurley’s career assist record in the first-round win over Queens – and controls the game in a way few 6-foot guards in the country can. Loyer is one of the best 3-point shooters in the country – since the start of 2026, he’s made 71 3-pointers on 44.7% shooting beyond the arc. At 6-foot-9, Kaufman-Ren has mastered his touch around the rim, shooting 58.0% and averaging 14.1 points and 8.5 rebounds per game this season.

Sweet 16 Schedule

• Thursday: No. 11 Texas vs. No. 2 Purdue (West), No. 9 Iowa vs. No. 4 Nebraska (South), No. 4 Arkansas vs. No. 1 Arizona (West), No. 3 Illinois vs. No. 2 Houston (South)
• Friday: No. 5 St. John’s (East) vs. No. 1 Duke (East), No. 4 Alabama vs. No. 1 Michigan (Midwest), No. 3 Michigan State vs. No. 2 UConn (East), No. 6 Tennessee vs. No. 2 Iowa State (Midwest)

Oscar Cluff is a senior, too, but he transferred in from South Dakota State. He’s a bruising 6-11 center who is rarely more than a couple feet from the basket. And the lone sophomore starter, C.J. Cox, is going to blossom into a star next season. Without his flurry of three huge 3-pointers near the end of the first half of the Miami win, Purdue might have been making arrangements to go back to West Lafayette to watch the rest of the tournament from home.

“I think the one thing that gets lost at Purdue because we don’t sign McDonald’s All-Americans is that our players are really good,” Painter said. “And that’s what you want, right? You want to be able to piece teams together, and our staff’s made improvements through the years in terms of finding guys that fit, finding skill. Obviously, we’ve had a great experience of having good big guys. Right now we have a really good point guard. We have a guy that can really shoot the basketball. TK is a very, very unique player in the different things that he can do. And it’s a really good balance.”

Good enough to win a national title? We’ll find out soon enough.

Tom Paquette and Jeff Mangurten of Stats Perform’s U.S. Data Insights contributed research to this story. For more coverage, follow on social media at Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook and X.

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