Weekly Word: Ambition, Purdue’s first-year bump, basketball and more
The Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s Weekly Word, we discuss Purdue football this fall, college basketball topics and more.
ON PURDUE’S NEW BEGINNING
However Saturday’s Purdue opener vs. Fresno State turns out, what you are going to see as the 2023 season opens is testament that Purdue really wants to be good.
Let’s be honest here and recognize that there were any number of more established coaches it could have hired that may have amounted to standing doubles. Instead, Purdue did stick its neck out some trying to hit a grand slam with Ryan Walters (and million-dollar offensive coordinator Graham Harrell). Everybody’s looking for the next rising star in the coaching business. Purdue seems to believe it instead found a comet. There is some risk in the unknown, though, and with the money at stake with big-time football nowadays, risk aversion is quite understandable.
It was a bold hire, one with immense up-side but, yes, some measure of risk. But that Purdue was drawn to what it viewed as potential greatness over the cold comfort of an experienced head coach with a typical experienced head coach persona and with a football background aligned with Purdue’s offensive history and Midwest/Big Ten roots.
It was an audacious move on Purdue’s part, the sort of move you make when you’d like to be something more than just OK, more than just good enough.
Meanwhile, this will start to play out this season against the backdrop of an again-renovated Ross-Ade Stadium. Facilities tend to be analogous with a program’s ambitions.
The fan experience is important, even though game-day revenues now pale in comparison to media-rights money. That’s the funny undercurrent to all this; major college football in bankrolled by TV but still has to work to get people to turn off their TVs — or tablets, or phones, or laptops or whatever — and come to the damn games, buy tickets, pay for parking, maybe a couple hot dogs and beers.
That said, Purdue didn’t have to do this stadium project, especially considering the, you know, global health and economic crisis that took place during the run-up to ground being broken.
I guess what my point is here is that right now, every Big Ten member is flush with cash, courtesy of the new billion-dollar media rights deal and whatever additional money might come next time these contracts have to be renegotiated.
If there was a time to be competitively complacent, to hire a retread coach who may or may not take you where you want to go, or to put the stadium off until absolutely necessary, hey, the checks come in either way. The job of making those checks as fat as can be into perpetuity, that’s Ohio State’s and Michigan’s and Penn State’s job. Everybody else can just tuck themselves away in the great whites’ wake if so desired, play things safe and easy and do just enough to keep the fans (relatively) happy.
Purdue has gone the other way since its football coaching position opened. There’s no telling when, or if, intent and results may line up, but the intent is obviously there.
Purdue coach Ryan Walters (Chad Krockover)
PURDUE’S X-FACTOR
Often when new coaches take over programs, they take over a roster that’s sick of losing or conditioned for winning, either of which can provide Year 1 bumps.
What Walters is taking on, I have no idea how to describe. Can’t call it a rebuild because Purdue won its division last season. Jeff Brohm succeeded at Purdue. He did not fail.
But you can’t really call it “not a rebuild” because the core of that team last season is gone and replaced by roughly 73 new transfers, give or take. I’m not sure we’re not in a place with college football where every season for everyone is a “rebuilding” year.
Here’s where maybe Purdue’s Year 1 bump can materialize.
These guys — Walters, Harrell and really the majority of those coaches, many of whom (Walters included) wouldn’t look out of place in uniform — are practically peers. Where there may seem to be a shortage of experience — over-rated, by the way — there’s an abundance of relatability and energy. By every account, coaches have made efforts to connect with and actually know their players, Walters included. That would represent a shift from the prior head coach and the layers of middle management that stood between him and his team.
Furthermore, the way things are now with transfer culture and NIL, players are commoditized more than ever, and have been for years now. Relationships are the collateral damage there.
Make no mistake: Purdue’s going to turn its roster over every year same as the next guy, but when players aren’t surprised when they find out the coach knows their name, they typically have a little more reason to want to play for that guy.
Purdue Flag (Photo: Chad Krockover)
RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK
• Interested to see how much time gets shaved off Saturday’s game by the keeping the clock running after first downs. When that rule came through, it figured it might mean at least one fewer possession per team in certain games, and thus give an advantage to more ball control-oriented teams, playing right into the hands of the joyless football played at Iowa and the traditionally bone-crunching football played for years at Wisconsin.
But what’s to say that quicker-strike offenses can’t put teams like those in an early hole and really force them out of their comfort zone. Urgency and panic are bound to set it in sooner if the game is 57 minutes long, essentially, instead of 60.
We’ll see how it plays out and what style of football it really favors.
• Funny thing about college basketball nowadays: How busy the off-season has become.
Consider the miles logged by Purdue alone this summer, one that wasn’t even all that uncommon. Zach Edey has been globe-trotting all summer and now into the fall with Team Canada, after a spring in which he went through the NBA draft process. Freshman Myles Colvin played in June in the 19U Games in Hungary. And he joined all his new teammates in Europe for their 11-day exhibition tour.
Practice is real in the summer now, and was even more frequent for Purdue because of the overseas trip.
It’s almost as if things slow down when the season — or at least “official” practice — starts, because the coming and going ceases and the schedule normalizes. But it’s a year-round game now more than ever.
• It’s funny how when you spend a whole spring and summer manufacturing thoughts how few are left when things actually start happening.
• Travis Perry‘s official visit is this weekend, as I believe we’ve exclusively reported. I will repeat: Purdue needs Gicarri Harris. His toughness and defensive stature set him apart. It would like Perry as well this deep into the process.
But is there urgency on Perry’s part? He’s been really methodical about everything. Is there urgency on Purdue’s part? It doesn’t need to over-sign, which it would have to do to accommodate both Harris and Perry.
• I know public depth charts are what they are in terms of reality, but man those are some small receivers Purdue’s got on that first team. You wonder if Purdue’s secondary-minded coaching staff won’t have a few pointers to give those guys when they inevitably get jammed at the line of scrimmage by Big Ten opponents. Keep in mind that injured newcomer Jahmal Edrine is 6-foot-3, 215. He’d have been a key guy this season in more ways than one.
I’m interested to see how Purdue uses its non-Garrett Miller tight ends. If this is a true Air Raid sort of thing, the tight end can be an odd man out, but Miller would be an exception, a player they’d move around and build scheme around. Without him, we may get a look at the position’s (as opposed to the player’s) role in this passing game.
The post Weekly Word: Ambition, Purdue’s first-year bump, basketball and more appeared first on On3.
