Well… we're saying there's a chance? Michigan picked up its first marquee victory of the year by stomping a Purdue team that had suffered its other three losses by a collective total of ten points. This Michigan team looks like a tourney lock. Penn State Michigan looks like an NIT team. The travails of youth.

This was a comprehensive beat down. You can point to the three-point shooting, and yeah that's a factor, but Michigan won virtually every facet of the game. They grabbed 7 more OREBs than Purdue and had seven fewer turnovers; Jaden Ivey was held to merely human levels of production; the eye test suggests the three-point gap was significantly influenced by shot quality.

How did this happen? Well, your intrepid observer has a few different suggestions.

1. Hunter Dickinson three-point gravity is a thing. Michigan stuck in the game at Mackey because Dickinson was making everything, and Purdue clearly focused on Dickinson pick and pop action early. Juwan Howard anticipated this and the early portions of the game featured a lot of Moussa Diabate dunking the ball as the Purdue big got lifted out of the paint and Mason Gillis was neither aware enough or big enough to do much about Diabate cutting to the rim. Dickinson's gravity was a major factor in Michigan's OREB dominance.
2. The kitchen sink was thrown at Ivey. After some dispiriting early possessions Michigan straight-up doubled/trapped Ivey on every screen and dared anyone else to make a play. This prevented Ivey from getting into the lane and was effective at reducing his usage and playmaking. Ivey went from 7 assists and 2 TOs in the first meeting to 0 assists and 5 TOs in the second. Ivey still went 5/8 from two and 5/7 from the line, but a couple of those baskets were early before Sink Time and a couple more were in transition. The defensive gambit worked.
3. Purdue's wonky defense gave Michigan the wrong looks from three. Caleb Houstan is elite at taking standstill three pointers and Purdue gave him six looks. He made four. Eli Brooks got open corner looks as well, and after the initial "oh no Dickinson" phase gave way to more caution about Diabate as a roll man, Dickinson got a number of good looks himself.
4. Zach Edey got in foul trouble. Dickinson drew a foul on him under a minute in and he played four first-half minutes. Trevion Williams continued to make Trademark Trevion Williams Garbage™™ but not having Edey as an option was problematic in a lot of ways for Purdue; when Williams was in Purdue frequently auto-doubled Dickinson, leading to rotations and the wrong looks from three.
5. Shooting randomness for the win. Yeah, Michigan dared the nation's leading ORTG guy to bury a few threes and got lucky he missed. Still… would rather rely on Mason Gillis bombing you into the stone age than Jaden Ivey.

All that adds up to an F5 night on Kenpom, and indeed as your author types this and the game makes the system Michigan flies up 20(!) spots and is now projected as a 17-13, 11-9 Big Ten team. That would be enough, probably. Just have to keep shooting a billion percent from three.