Purdue 1980 Rewind: Tales of Lee Rose, Rivalry on Steroids and Final Four Disappointment

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Forty-four years is a long time. Purdue basketball fans know that all too well, because it's been that long between Final Four appearances.

Millions of words have been written — many by me and my staff at Sports Illustrated Purdue — in the past few weeks about this 2024 Purdue team. They've won the Big Ten, had star center Zach Edey win his second straight national Player of the Year award and set aside decades of postseason misery by winning their first five NCAA Tournament games to advance to the NCAA Tournament championship game here in Glendale, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb. They'll take on UConn at 9:20 p.m. ET on Monday at State Farm Stadium

It's full circle — a very full circle —for me, because it's a very small group that's actually covered BOTH of Purdue's latest Final Fours. (Full disclosure, I missed their first in 1969, when they lost to UCLA in the finals.) It's also rare because of WHY I've covered both of them.

I was 21 the first time, and I'm 65 now, so that tells you a lot. The 1980 Final Four in Indianapolis was at the start of my professional career, and this one is near the end. I covered that first one because of the people involved. I wasn't planning on covering this one, but when Purdue made it, I had to be here.

Because of the people involved.

I'm very happy for Matt Painter, who's done a lot of great things at Purdue during his 19 years but never made it to the Final Four. He has now, and he's won a Final Four game, beating N.C. State 63-50 on Saturday in the national semifinals.

During our first three years at Sports Illustrated Purdue, I've gotten to know Zach Edey and Ethan Morton and the others very well. They're great kids with great families, so I'm happy for these Purdue players, too. Especially, Edey, who has improved by leaps and bounds every year more than anyone I've ever seen at the collegiate level. And that's saying something.

But more on them later. For now, let's turn back the clock to 1980. It was a long time ago, but I still remember it like it was yesterday.

Because of the people involved.

My bonds with Purdue coach Lee Rose

Lee Rose was the head coach at Purdue for only two years, but they were memorable. He replaced Fred Schaus, who coached the Boilermakers for six years without winning an NCAA Tournament game.

Rose was an odd fit, a man of the South (Lexington, Ky.) who had unheard-of success at little UNC-Charlotte, where he reached the Final Four in 1977. He had immediate success at Purdue, going 27-8 and 13-5 in the Big Ten, sharing the conference title with Michigan State and Iowa. They split with Indiana that year, the home team winning each game, and his time with taking on Bob Knight had started.

The rivalry was, at least for two years, very civil. Even though there was a lot at stake in both 1979 and 1980, animosity was at a minimum. Lee Rose was the new coach at Purdue and he stayed just those two years, but there were no issues between the two programs, even though it was ugly beforehand and would get very ugly again a year after he left.

“During my entire time at Purdue, I never had a cross word with Knight. Not one,’’ Rose said to me in a 2015 interview. He passed away in 2022. “When I took the Purdue job, I didn’t really know any of the Big Ten coaches. I had heard there had been some problems between the two schools, but when I first saw Coach Knight at the Big Ten coaches meeting, I went up to him and we talked. I said to him ‘I don’t know about what’s gone on before, but you’re not going to have any problems with me. And he said to me ‘You’ve just done something no one else has ever done.’ 

“It was a nice exchange and we never did have a single issue. I respected the heck out of him as a coach and really enjoyed competing against him. “Any time I ever saw Coach Knight, he was always cordial with me,’’ Purdue’s Rose said. “Even later, when I worked with USA Basketball and whenever I saw Coach Knight there when we were picking teams, we always had nice conversations. 

“When we played at IU and lost, I congratulated him and his players. And when we won at Purdue, he even came into our locker room and congratulated my kids. It takes two people to do that. There were a lot of strong personalities in the Big Ten, but I didn’t have a problem with any of them. Especially Bob Knight.’’

The NCAA Tournament was only 40 teams back then, and the Boilermakers got screwed. Michigan State and Iowa got the two Big Ten bids, and Purdue was relegated to the NIT Tournament. They made the most of it, advancing all the way to the finals — where arch-rival Indiana awaited. The Hoosiers won that third meeting, a great game with a 53-52 final score.

It was weird to play a heated IU-Purdue game so far away from home. I was there in Madison Square Garden for that one. Bonus basketball in that rivalry is always a good thing. It was the first time they had ever met in the postseason.

We wouldn't have to wait long to do it again.

IU-Purdue six times in 15 months

In Rose's second season, the Big Ten was loaded once again. Indiana, who was preseason No. 1, won the Big Ten on the final day of the season, beating Ohio State. Purdue went 11-7 and finished third. All three teams made the NCAA Tournament, which had expanded to 48 teams that year. Iowa also made it, and it was the first time ever that four Big Ten teams were in the same NCAA field.

Purdue was 19-9 in the regular season and earned the No. 6 seed in the Mideast Regional. There was controversy from the start. The top four seeds in each region got first-round byes, and the higher seeds usually hosted. But St. John's, the No. 3 seed, didn't have a place to play so the NCAA gave Purdue the early-round games. After beating LaSalle 90-82 at Mackey Arena in the first round, they upset St. John's too, winning 87-72 in a rout.

The St. John’s people did a ton of bitching afterward about having to play Purdue on its home court. (The NCAA stopped the process a few years later). But for Rose and Purdue, all that mattered was surviving and advancing. They were off to the regionals — and the most amazing few days of basketball I've ever seen.

Kentucky and Indiana were the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in that regional, which was being played at Rupp Arena in Lexington. (That can't happen anymore, either.) I've never seen so many people invade a city for a regional., easily 100.000 or more. The UK and Indiana fans dominated, of course, but there were a ton of Purdue people there, too. Duke was the semi-forgotten fourth team.

Indiana and Purdue would meet again, this time in the regional semifinal. It was a homecoming for Rose, and the first-ever meeting in the NCAA Tournament between to the rivals. (It's also never happened since.) It was their sixth meeting in 15 months, which has also never happened before or since.

“We had great battles with Indiana, and that was really rare, playing three times in a year. It was very rare to do it two years in a row,’’ Rose said during our interview. “It was a big thing for us going into the next season that our previous year had ended with that loss to Indiana at the NIT in 1979. 

“It left a bad taste in the kids’ mouth, all of them. There was a certain amount of carryover from that. And it even still carried over into the postseason, definitely. When we were getting ready to play Indiana in the tournament, what happened the previous year came up often. We didn’t want them ending our season again.’’

Everyone was looking forward to the weekend’s IU-Kentucky regional final showdown of No. 1 vs. No. 2. There was no doubt among the IU fan base was, and same with the players. Indiana and Kentucky played every year back then, and the Wildcats had won the December meeting.

“We wanted another shot at Kentucky because of the way they had beaten us earlier in the year,’’ Indiana forward Steve Risley said. “(Mike Woodson) was really hurting then — he had his back surgery a week later — and (Randy) Wittman went out for good in that game, too. With Woody back, we felt we were better than they were.

“But I’ll also tell you this. We would never look past Purdue. Never. Our total focus was on that game. We knew the challenge we had with them.’’

Being back in Lexington was great for Rose. He also went through there in 1977 when he won a regional with UNC-Charlotte

“I was from Kentucky, I went to school right there at Transylvania in Lexington, and UK,’’ Rose said. “My daddy died young, but my mother was there and it was really nice for me, because she couldn’t get to many games. That was big. It was a great experience.’’

More than 30 years later, I talked to former Louisville Courier-Journal sports columnist about Rose and that weekend. All those years later, he still got emotional about Rose's weekened as a Lexington native.

“For me, the story that weekend was Lee Rose because we had been friends for a long time. Lee grew up in Lexington and we both went to Transylvania College. He’s a really good man and I was rooted for him, quietly of course,’’ Reed said. “Lee came from a very, very poor background and grew up maybe a driver and a wedge from Rupp Arena. He worked so hard for everything he’s accomplished in his life.

“He had a good team that year, but I think everyone still expected Indiana to win that game. They had been playing really well coming into the tournament. For Lee, this was a dream opportunity, to beat Indiana and Kentucky in Lexington and get to a Final Four. That was special.’’

That's exactly what happened. Woodson, now Indiana's head coach the past three years, wasn't himself post-surgery, and he was running out of gas. Purdue played great, and won 76-69, knocking out the Hoosiers. Duke stunned Kentucky a few hours later, and then Rose beat Duke to advance to the 1980 Final Four in Indianapolis.

"Playing Indiana so often, it’s not like there were a lot of adjustments you can make. We knew them so well, just like they knew us,'' Rose said. "You might throw a little defensive wrinkle in there, maybe drop a defender off on somebody now and then, but that’s about it. It’s all about executing after that. You’re not going to fool Knight with anything, and he wasn’t going to fool me either. You had to bring your A-game, and we brought it for sure. We stuck to our game plan all the way through. 

“We had a game plan that we had a lot of confidence in. We just wanted to keep throwing it in to (center Joe Barry Carroll) every time and force Indiana into some tough decisions, some tough double teams,’’ Rose recalled. “He played great and also did a great job of passing out to his teammates. We got a lot of good looks in that game and we shot really well early. Joe was outstanding. Everyone played well.’’

Fiery Indiana coach Bob Knight got a technical foul on the way to the locker room at halftime. Purdue got the two bonus points then continued to build on that lead.

The Knight technical was a huge turning point in the game.

“No question it was. I thought that issue at the half was really big,’’ Rose said. “When we came back out, we hit the shots and then scored right away to go up 13. From there, we quickly got it to 20, we were playing so well. They made a run at the end, but we had a big enough cushion to handle it. I thought that issue at the half was really big.

"It’s difficult to chase down a good team from behind. Eight or nine points is one thing, but 13 is tough. And 20 is even tougher.''

The six games in 15 months between these two arch-rivals were so even. Both teams won three times. Both teams knocked out the other in a postseason tournament. Indiana scored 353 points, Purdue 351. 

“You can’t get any more even than that,’’ Rose said.

But in the only NCAA tournament game the two schools have played, it’s Purdue that gets to claim the upper hand. They’re 1-0.

“Rose and Purdue beat Indiana in a great game. He had his kids really well prepared and everything they tried against Indiana worked,’’ Billy Reed said. “That was a coach’s dream come true that night, beating your biggest rival in the tournament, in the city you grew up in. He was really proud of that game.’’

Purdue would fall short in the 1980 Final Four, losing to UCLA 67-62. It was a big disappointment because winning a national title was there for the taking. All four No. 1 seeds — Kentucky, Syracuse, LSU and DePaul — were knocked out in the regionals.

Purdue, a No. 6 seed, lost to a UCLA team that was a No. 8 seed out of the West Region. Louisville, a No. 2 seed, beat No. 5 seed Iowa in the other semifinal and then won the national title two nights later, beating UCLA 59-54. There was still a third-place game back then, and Purdue beat Iowa 75-58.

It would be Lee Rose's last game at Purdue.

Rose and 'Missing Banners'

That final interview with Rose in 2015 meant a lot to me. We had actually become good friends over time, and it started just a month after that 1980 showdown. I was a senior at Indiana in 1980 and my last Indiana game as a student reporter was that loss to Purdue. When Knight wasn't talking to me — that's another book in itself — Rose would always take my calls or answer my questions before and after games.

Rose's media relations people at Purdue had told him about being banished from Indiana access by Knight, so every time Indiana and Purdue played, he opened his doors to me. I always really appreciated that, because I survived my final year as a college reporter thanks to opposing coaches like Rose.

In April of 1980, I had already accepted a summer internship at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, a top-10 national sports section. They had heard a rumor that Rose was a candidate for the basketball job at the University of South Florida in Tampa. They asked me to check on it, and I gladly said yes.

So I called Lee Rose. And he answered. I asked him about it. He said ''Tom, on the record I will tell you that I have no comment. Off the record, I can tell you that we're talking and as soon as it gets done, I promise you that I will let you know.''

This is how good of a guy Lee Rose was. The next morning, he called me, said the deal was done and I helped report it for a newspaper that I hadn't even started working for yet. That was a big deal to me, and it sure gave me a lot of credibility when I started my internship in June. They hired me six weeks into my internship, and I loved my first 10 years of my career there. Lee Rose played a small part in that.

Rose and I spent a lot of time together in Tampa. He took the job at USF, a school no one had heard of, and spent six years there. I covered high schools to start my career in St. Petersburg, but I would go over to USF for a lot for games. The following year, in 1981, i was in his office in Tampa when he called Bob Knight to congratulate him on winning the 1981 national title.

Rose never made an NCAA Tournament there, but made the NIT three times — a first for USF — and had a lot of good teams that competed for Sun Belt Conference titles. He made basketball relevant at USF, went 106-69, and then left in 1986 to become an assistant coach in the NBA.

He had several stops along the way in the pros for 15 years, and whenever he was nearby, we'd try to get together for a quick hello. Every year or two, I got to see him, and I always thoroughly enjoyed that.

We did an interview for the last time in 2015, when I was writing a book with former Indianapolis Star colleague Terry Hutchens called "Missing Banners.'' It's about five season where Indiana could have won a title and didn't — and that 1980 season was one of those five. When I asked Rose if he'd talk to me about it, he couldn't have been more forthcoming. We chatted for over an hour, and it's some of the best parts of the book.

Rose started having health problems soon after that, and the last few years of his life were very hard . He passed away in 2022, and he was 85 years old.

Purdue had gone 44 years without reaching a Final Four since Rose's 1980 team. During those 44 years, the Boilermakers have only had two head coaches — Gene Keady and Matt Painter — and Rose often gets forgotten in the Purdue story line.

Purdue is back now, and they play for the school's first-ever national title on Monday night against Connecticut. Up in heaven, Lee Rose will be rooting hard for them. It was just two years, and it wasn't the right long-term fit, but Rose cherished his time at Purdue.

And now, 44 years later, they get their moment in the sun. Lee Rose will be looking down, with a smile on his heavenly face. Maybe Bob Knight, who died in November, will be watching with him.