Purdue is back atop The Associated Press Top 25 men’s college basketball poll, right where it spent so much of last season.
The Boilermakers ascended to No. 1 on Monday after an impressive run through a loaded field at the Maui Invitational. They beat Gonzaga, Tennessee and Marquette — three of the top 11 teams in the nation — in consecutive days, and that was enough to earn 60 of 63 first-place votes from the national panel of Top 25 voters.
It took the Boilermakers until Dec. 12 to reach No. 1 last year, where they spent seven weeks over two different stints.
“Our guys were resilient, I thought they hung in there, and I thought at times we didn’t play our best basketball in the three days, but I thought we played really hard,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said after the Maui Invitational. “We competed, and that is what you got to do. You got to just sometimes hang in there and just keep competing and make one more play.”
Purdue replaced preseason No. 1 Kansas, which fell to fifth after losing to Marquette in the Maui semifinals before beating Tennessee in the third-place game. Arizona moved up one spot to No. 2 with one first-place vote, Marquette climbed a spot to third and UConn was fourth with two first-place votes.