Three takeaways: Michigan bludgeoned on road by No. 2 Purdue

On Tuesday night, the Michigan basketball team suffered one of the worst losses in program history. The 67-99 loss came at the hands of the No. 2-ranked Purdue Boilermakers, which put on a shooting clinic in front of their fans at Mackey Arena.

Meanwhile, Michigan was without Dug McDaniel, and the Wolverines were simply brutally outmatched by one of college basketball's better teams.

Michigan fell to 7-12 overall and 2-6 in conference play with the loss. Here are three takeaways from the game.

Tuesday night's 32-point loss had to have been one of the most humiliating, embarrassing experiences in the history of the Michigan basketball program. The Wolverines looked thoroughly outmatched in every facet of the game and were clearly severely outmatched by Purdue.

In Michigan's defense, Purdue is one of the nation's best teams and is a leading favorite to make it to the Final Four and win the national championship, but a 30-plus-point defeat in Big Ten play is simply unacceptable.

Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the historic loss is that Purdue big man Zach Edey, who is the reigning National Player of the Year, wasn't even his dominant self. Edey finished with a respectable 16 points, but he still fell short of his season average by more than seven points.

Edey didn't need to be dominant in this game, as he typically is. Purdue was getting whatever it wanted from a plethora of different scoring sources.

The Boilermakers had seven players score at least seven points en route to a 99-point performance. Guard Lance Jones lit up the Michigan defense for 24 points, more than doubling his season average.

It was the first 30-point defeat in Big Ten play for Michigan since a 2003 contest against Wisconsin.

If it wasn't already abundantly clear, Tuesday's game was a perfect representation of just how far Michigan has fallen since its Elite Eight appearance in 2021.

After the Fab Five left school in the early '90s, Michigan, riddled with sanctions, notoriously fell off the map as a basketball school and struggled to get back to national prominence until the early years of the John Beilein era in the early 2010s.

Many of those years, especially in the early-to-mid 2000s, Michigan was coached by Brian Ellerbe (1997-2001) and Tommy Amaker (2001-07). The 10-year period in which Ellerbe and Amaker ran the program is often looked on as the dark years that many Michigan fans would like to, and probably do forget.

It's a time in Michigan basketball history that hardly anyone refers back to or talks about — it was that bad.

While the stretch of poor seasons was every bit of 10-plus years, Michigan actually never finished with a winning percentage worse than .357 (2000-01). The Wolverines went 10-18 that season, in what turned out to be the second-worst season by winning percentage the program has seen since 1981-82.

Now at 7-12, Michigan currently holds a winning percentage of just .368, only 11 percentage points better than the worst season of the neglected dark days of Michigan basketball.

There are still 12 games remaining in the regular season, but it's extremely plausible this Michigan team could finish with the worst winning percentage the program has seen since 1981-82.

If there's any glimmer of a bright spot from Tuesday night's obliteration, it's that Jaelin Llewellyn continues to impress as Michigan's starting point guard in the team's road games. As McDaniel served the second game of his academic road suspension, Llewellyn once again stepped up and contributed in a major way.

In the first game McDaniel missed, a matchup against Maryland on Jan. 11, Llewellyn scored nine points in 33 minutes of action.

On Tuesday, he upped his production even more, and he led the team in scoring. The graduate point guard finished with 16 points on 6-12 shooting and 3-6 from beyond the arc.

There were a few poor turnovers from Llewellyn, but overall, he played a rather solid game as Michigan got ran off the court.

With McDaniel set to miss road games for the foreseeable future, Llewellyn will need to continue to step up in the sophomore's absence. Michigan's success will be directly tied to the production — or lack thereof — it gets from the point guard position.

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