Weekly Word: Ryan Walters, Purdue and The Bird and more
The Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s Weekly Word, we discuss Purdue basketball’s defensive trajectory, football and more.
ON PURDUE FOOTBALL
I’ve wanted to mention for some time this observation: Ryan Walters seems to have the right temperament for being a head coach at this level.
You know, some do, and some don’t, and you don’t know with the young guys until they show you one way or the other. It’s the way a coach carries himself that serves as one of the demarcation lines between good assistant coaches and good head coaches. I have no idea what Walters is like behind closed doors but in public view he comes across as extremely even-keeled.
There was no freak-out in him after Fresno State, nor was there any chest-beating after Virginia Tech. The Illinois game was a big win and maybe a more personally significant one for him, but his demeanor wasn’t all that different from the week before after a loss to Wisconsin. He poked at needed improvement after a win, which is always a reflection of someone who sees a bigger picture.
That Walters made changes — some more significant than others — on the fly, I think showed open-mindedness and an analytical, introspective mind, something that a lot of coaches 20 years older and twice as experienced might not.
Look, Illinois is not great. We know this. But there are plenty of teams left on the schedule who aren’t great either. Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Indiana. Hell, Iowa just lost its quarterback.
Purdue has a real chance to get better and better as the season wears on.
Walters, to me, seems up to the job of helping it along.
Streaming
PURDUE ON PEACOCK
So, the other night, I was having some issues that were not exactly conducive to falling asleep at a reasonable hour. I anticipated them and planned accordingly, picking out a movie to watch at 11 p.m.
I’ve wanted to see “The Covenant” for some time and found it on Prime Video, to which I subscribe.
Here was the thing, though: Because everyone in my house was asleep I could not watch the movie in my living room or office for fear of making too much noise.
I turned to my iPad, which was not perpetually logged in like my TV and phone are. I tried to log in on the device and my password was incorrect. Standard protocol then becomes changing your password if you can’t find the established one — then making sure you inform everyone in your household who may need it — but in this case, when Amazon sent my OTP (that’s One Time Password for those who don’t speak the language), it took me to a confirmation screen that asked me for the expiration date for a credit card I do not possess, but seemed to be on file with Amazon. The only recourse then was to contact Amazon, but again, it’s now well after 11 p.m. and, yeah, no.
The other option: Watch the movie on my phone (once the proper iPhone dongle could be located, since my iPad, iPhone and MacBook all demand different headset adapters). Never found the dongle, but did locate the terribly uncomfortable earphones that came with my last iPhone, so I watched the movie on an iPhone 13 Pro after wasting a bunch of time trying in vain to cast the movie from phone to tablet.
Anyway, I tell you this stupid little story not to put you to sleep nor to sound like an entitled lamenter of first world problems, but to illuminate the reality that sometimes juggling streaming services is a real pain in the ass, keeping track of what’s where, what log-in info works where, etc. And that says nothing of the expense involved with juggling services.
I bring this up because as you are aware, Purdue football just played its first of three consecutive Peacock-exclusive games a few days before it was announced that six Boilermaker basketball games would appear exclusively on NBC’s streaming service.
I don’t think any of the Big Ten’s 14-as-of-press-time members would say out loud how less than ideal it is for them to have sacrificed mainstream network exposure for a portion of their games, because the checks are king, and those checks will be big.
If you’ve been surprised by the streaming-exclusive lay-out here, you shouldn’t have been.
This was a value proposition for NBC, the same way Thursday Night Football was for Prime, the reason I’m subscribed to that service. NBC spent money to make money, and of course that cost was going to be passed down to customers. That’s business. Time will tell whether it’s good business. Everyone’s flying blind right now.
But it is another creative way for media Goliaths to weaponize — rather, monetize — fans’ passions. When there’s a cable-carriage standoff, have you ever heard a network put out a statement accusing the cable company of preventing you from watching “Friends” re-runs or Animal Planet? No, it’s always the Big Game. That’s what moves the public-opinion needle and turns people against corporate bogeymen.
NBC didn’t plop tens of millions or whatever its share of the billion headed to the Big Ten was to stream Northwestern vs. Nebraska basketball coast to coast. This is inventory and you don’t put the expired milk on the shelves, right? Of course marquee games were going to be subscriber-exclusive (and, hey, given my line of work, no judgement there.)
Sure, it’s only a couple bucks a month or whatever, but all our circumstances are different. A retiree accustomed to just flipping around his or her Xfinity channels until the game showed up on some ESPN platform may not have the same disposable income as a lot of us, nor the same technology or tech savvy. Hell, I barely do, as my Amazon adventure reminded me.
Those checks are great for the schools, the trade-off for Purdue-Indiana, for example, not being broadcast on every television set in this state. For NBC, we’ll see. For the fans, I think their experience here might be the collateral damage.
I’m not saying access to games should be free. But it should be simple.
The die-hards will be there no matter what. Hell, if you’re reading this site, you’re one of them and you probably already know what games are on The Bird, as it shall heretofore be known. But there are tons of people out there who aren’t constantly tethered to the news about their team.
If you want to see what this means for the casual fan, I challenge you to check my Twitter mentions on Jan. 16 at about 6:50 p.m.
Purdue Flag (Photo: Chad Krockover)
RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK
• As a crotchety and unpleasant veteran of the recruiting-coverage game, I say “dilly, dilly” (yeah, that’s right, I said it) to the NCAA’s proposed banning of recruiting photoshoots for unofficial visitors, not because it can be an untenable drain on athletic department resources and manpower, and to this point a mandatory one since everyone’s doing it — kudos to Purdue for being at the forefront of it — but because anything that invites even the slightest bit of substance or sanity to recruiting is best for all parties. (Official visitors, yeah, knock yourself out. You’ve earned it.)
High school freshmen don’t need the GQ treatment. You treat a kid like he’s a Kardashian when he’s 15, then you’ve got to recruit him like he’s a Kardashian when he’s 17, right? I’ve forever said that when recruits act like divas and attention hounds and act in bad faith, it’s not always because that’s who they are, but because they might be products of a recruiting environment designed to coddle and stroke and deceive.
Cutting out some of the front-end glitz may not matter at all, but it could contribute to a healthier process. When you throw shiny stuff in the water, you’re not trying to feed the fish; you’re trying to catch the fish.
It’s not the NCAA’s job nor the schools’ job to force young people into making sound decisions for sound reasons, but it sure doesn’t hurt anyone when they do.
• Look I don’t want this to sound like shillery, but the more I watch of new Purdue recruit CJ Cox, the more I think he’s a better fit for what Purdue needs than long-time target Travis Perry, who’s ostensibly out of the picture now for the Boilermakers.
Perry’s a consummate Purdue guy, but some Purdue guys over the years have come with some very real limitations, be it athletically, be it defensively, whatever. Purdue guys can come in many forms, shapes and sizes, though, and Cox sure seems like one, only with more defensive potential than Perry, more size and strength and at worst a comparable shot. Don’t know about the intangibles that Purdue loved in Perry, but everything else seems to stack up pretty well. Purdue’s got to get back to guarding people on the perimeter and Cox would seem like a better fit for that need.
I should add here, too, that I have no idea if Perry ultimately would have chosen Purdue. He had a lot of chances to.
• Too many gifs in this column today. My bad.
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