Over the last few years, the No. 23 Penn State Lady Lions and the Purdue Boilermakers have been the marquee programs in Big Ten women's basketball. Penn State is the proud owner of the last two conference regular-season titles; Purdue has taken the trophy at the last two conference tournaments.

Seemingly every time the two have faced off in the last few seasons, they have treated their fans to an outstanding game.

Not so much yesterday afternoon. Quite to the contrary, in fact.

In what was undoubtedly their sloppiest performance of the year, the Lady Lions fell out of first place in the conference by losing to the Boilermakers, 50-44, at Mackey Arena in West Lafayette, Ind.

And no, that's not a halftime score.

Purdue has struggled to a 6-5 record in the Big Ten this year, but the Boilermakers were only as good as they had to be, and frankly that wasn't really fantastic.

"Our defense really let us down in the first half," Lady Lions coach Rene Portland said after the game on the Penn State Sports Network.

The defense may not have been anything to write home about, but it seemed as though Portland was ignoring her team's atrocious 17-point offensive output in the half, which must have been almost as easy as ignoring an elephant in your living room.

Some of Penn State's offensive travails can be traced to the foul trouble of its leading scorer, senior guard Tanisha Wright. Wright picked up three fouls in the blink of an eye and played only four minutes in the opening half, notching an 0-fer in four shots.

"That's the longest we have ever played without Tanisha," Portland said. "Jess [Strom] was trying to keep us in the game all by herself, and when you do that, sometimes you get a little bit sloppy."

Senior guard Strom led Penn State with 11 points but shot only 4-of-14. She was the only Lady Lion in double figures. Wright was held to less than 10 points for the first time this season. She shot 2-of-15 from the field.

When its two leading scorers, who average a total of 37 points per game, are held to 17, even the deepest teams would find themselves in dire straits -- Penn State is certainly not the deepest of teams.

Simply put, no Lady Lion was able to step in and fill the void created by the struggles of Strom and Wright.

In fact, reading the final box score and watching both teams' horrendous execution in the waning moments of the game was enough to give any basketball fan a headache.

Despite turning the ball over a season-high 20 times in the game, Penn State found itself down by only two with 90 seconds to play. True to the pattern of general offensive ineptitude that held sway for most of the game, Penn State was unable to get into its offense and the shot clock expired with the ball still in Strom's hands.

Penn State had another chance to tie the game when Purdue's Katie Gearlds missed a 3-pointer on the Boilermakers' subsequent possession, but managed to allow an offensive rebound, which all but ended Penn State's chances of winning.

The final statistics must have James Naismith spinning in his grave. Penn State shot 15-of-54 on the game, a stunningly horrible 28-percent clip. Purdue shot just 31 percent. Neither team had an assist-to-turnover ratio of better than 0.5, as the game featured a total of 39 turnovers and only 17 assists.