He hasn’t watched a replay of the game. He will one day. “Get out a pair of No. 2 pencils, and just jab them in my eyes,’’ Matt Painter tells The Athletic, ruefully. The Purdue coach doesn’t need to cue up the tape, though, to know what happened. He knows, and by that he doesn’t just mean the No. 1 seed Boilermakers’ stunning 63-58 loss to tiny, No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last month; he means he knows the what in terms of the why — why it happened to Purdue.

On the micro level, it’s not too hard to discern. It’s there for the naked eye in the box score — 16 turnovers, 19 percent shooting from the arc  — a “recipe for disaster,’’ as Painter labels it. The missed shots he can live with. The analytics savant says his team led the nation in uncontested perimeter shots by a wide margin, and though he saw his players’ confidence slip during the latter half of the season, he did not mind the shots the Boilermakers took against Fairleigh Dickinson. The turnovers, that’s another story. They ate him up, most coming almost as unforced errors in the halfcourt rather than succumbing to FDU’s press. “There’s an old coaching cliché,’’ he says. “You can’t rebound a turnover.’’

But Painter isn’t worried about what went wrong with Purdue on March 17, 2023. The painfully self-aware coach is talking about the program’s Achilles heel, one that made the Boilermakers not just vulnerable to FDU this year but to Saint Peter’s in last year’s Sweet 16, and North Texas in the first round the year before. A few years back, Painter made a concerted effort to shift his recruiting focus, searching for players who fit Purdue like a perfect widget. He wanted thinkers, guys who could understand his offensive strategy, and who suited his makeup in terms of character and commitment.

What he realized though — almost in real time as the FDU loss was unspooling in front of him — is that he forgot about variety. “We keep getting beat by the same teams with a different name: small guards who are quick,’’ Painter says. “I got a little too the same. I’ve attacked and evaluated getting the right person here, but I didn’t concentrate on having enough athleticism and quickness to offset that. That’s what we need.’’