Dan Johnson breaks down the opening odds at DraftKings Sportsbook for the first round March Madness game between the Purdue Boilermakers and the Queens NC Royals.
The Purdue Boilermakers landed a two seed in the South Region of the bracket, and they’ll face off against the 15-seed Queens NC Royals.
Queens earned its way here the hard way, winning the Atlantic Sun tournament to secure the program’s first NCAA berth since completing the Division I transition, and the Royals did it with a style that refuses to be boring. They are 21-13, they score 84.9 points per game—19th nationally—and they play at a pace that can turn any game into a sprint. The problem is that their defense has lived dangerously all year too, allowing 82.9 per game, which is down near the bottom of Division I. That combination is exactly why Queens feels like such a March curiosity: exhilarating, loose, volatile, and fully capable of making a favorite sweat for stretches before the talent gap starts pressing down.
Purdue, meanwhile, enters with the full weight of a program that expects this week to be the beginning of a darling run. The Boilermakers just won the Big Ten tournament title, beating Michigan 80-72 on Sunday after taking down Nebraska 74-58 the day before, and they arrive at 26-8 with one of the sport’s steadiest engines still humming. Braden Smith had 14 points and 11 assists in the title game and is sitting on the edge of Bobby Hurley’s NCAA career assists record. That detail fits the larger Purdue picture pretty well: this team plays with structure, pace control, and the kind of offensive fluency that can make a 2-vs-15 game feel over before halftime.
There is history here too. Purdue has been to the Final Four twice in the modern era, just reached another one in 2024, and carries the unmistakable mood of a national-title threat, even without a men’s basketball championship banner of its own. Queens brings the fresh-program buzz and a real scoring appetite. Purdue brings the machinery, the seeding, and a version of March where efficiency starts to look like force.