With four different Missouri Valley teams in action on Friday night, there were multiple ways the league could impress. UIC could look great in a win over Robert Morris (they did). Indiana State could spoil Chris Capko’s home debut (they did). Southern Illinois could get a road win at Kansas City (they did not). It was beyond even my wildest dreams that Valpo could go into Mackey Arena and knock off Purdue. That’s exactly what Roger Powell Jr.’s team did: 83-80 in double overtime.
If there was a way
that Valpo could pull the upset, playing a slow-paced game was exactly what it needed. Purdue is typically a slow team, but 74 possessions in a double-overtime game is outrageous. The Beacons started slow but made the most of their offensive possessions in the second half and OT.
In OT, it looked like Purdue was going to pull away, but the Beacons were resilient. Rakim Chaney went to the line for a one-and-one with four seconds to play. After the ball bounced off the back rim a couple of times, Chaney grabbed his own miss, dribbled it out, hoisted a game-tying three and had a prayer answered to send the game to a second overtime.
The heroics were far from over though. In the second overtime, the teams went back and forth, and with five seconds to go, it looked like a third overtime was in the cards in West Lafayette. That’s where we have to go back in time.
Powell Jr. is a Joliet, Ill., native. When he got the Valpo job, his first high school commit was a guard out of Joliet West High School named Justus McNair. That commit, now in his third year with the program, dribbled up the right side of the floor and barely got a shot off that rattled around the rim and won the game for Valpo. McNair’s shot gave Powell Jr. the biggest win of his career and Valpo its first win over a high-major program in nearly a decade.
Valpo’s win is not just big for the program but for the Missouri Valley Conference as a whole. In the 2020’s, current members of the Missouri Valley had just five wins against high-major teams. Three of those were by Ben McCollum’s Drake team, who advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Now, Powell Jr.’s team has given the conference one of its biggest wins in years.
On Friday, Chaney and McNair became heroes, but their heroics are bigger than just the win. Last season, Valpo had its first winning conference record as a member of the Missouri Valley. The team had all the makings of a group that could take another step forward and compete at the top of the league. After Friday’s win, that seems like a reality. The Beacons now sit at 121st in KenPom. The last time they were that high was mid-December of 2017. The program’s trajectory looks better than it has since they joined the Missouri Valley Conference.
