Three Thoughts From The Weekend: Purdue football, the NCAA Tournament and more
GoldandBlack.com’s Three Thoughts from the Weekend column runs every Monday morning, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting or whatever else comes to mind. In this week’s edition, some thoughts on Purdue football, the Final Four and the state of college basketball officiating.
ON A NEEDED FOUNDATION
Something that has jumped out to me from a distance and from what I’ve been told about Purdue’s new staff full of thirty-somethings: Their collective confidence and self-assuredness. It can be dangerous when coaches may not know what they don’t know, but the upshot is something that has to rub off on their new team.
At Purdue, there almost always has to be something that sets the Boilermakers apart and evens the playing field against more talented, and often more physical, teams, whether it’s systematic, intangible or whatever. When Jeff Brohm showed up in 2017 it was creativity and the energy that staff brought out of its roster, but there was also considerable benefit in inheriting a senior class dog-tired of losing, and losing to an embarrassing extent.
Ryan Walters and Co. inherit a roster that’s experienced success but isn’t exactly stacked with established talent. Something is going to have to make this group something more than the sum of its parts if Purdue’s going to be successful against a much more difficult schedule than the one it rode to a division title last year.
It stands to reason to suggest that perhaps the coaching staff’s collective personality may need to be infectious enough to craft a certain attitude from this group, similar to what happened in 2017, and going back way further, 1997. Attitude is the starting point for any quick turnaround, if you ask me. This doesn’t fit the profile of a “rebuild” — Purdue just won the Big Ten West — but it will be something of a re-imagination, reinvention, re-whatever you want to call it.
The Final Four (Photo: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
ON THE NCAA TOURNAMENT
When NIL and the Transfer Era came to bear, I heard a familiar refrain: The rich get richer.
Well, in some senses, yeah. The best player in the MAC very rarely is gonna stay in the MAC very long.
But if this NCAA Tournament is any indication, the combination of the two sea changes has meant the opposite: The most randomized championship event in sports came down to a Final Four of a 4, two 5s and a 9. No blue-bloods, though UConn’s history isn’t chopped liver. There was a mid-major and a kinda-mid-major. The biggest name among the four coaches is Hurley, and he’s like the third-most accomplished Hurley.
Parity, brought on by the combination of the two forces mentioned above, and the programs’ involved ability to manage them.
Every program in America has to be on board with and on top of NIL and the transfer portal. That much is obvious.
That’s not how Purdue intends to build a program, and contrary to popular belief, Purdue’s doing a lot right as a program. People want NCAA Tournament success, I get that, but Purdue wants NCAA Tournament success, too, but it also still needs to win in November, December, January and February.
Chemistry is always going to be one of Matt Painter’s non-negotiables when it comes to taking on transfers and managing a locker room in which players might be making more money than many of the adult professionals, maybe even coaches, around them.
Finding that right guy who’s both good enough, getable and sufficiently low-maintenance, that’s going to be a challenge, but a challenge Purdue’s going to face time and again from here on out.
Refs who are probably doing a great job and are being unfairly indicted by us using their photo here. Sorry. (Photo: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
ON THE STATE OF OFFICIATING
Hey, I don’t know if you guys have noticed or not, but college basketball has a bit of what you might call an officiating problem, as some of this weekend’s Final Four games reflected.
The men’s games were one thing, especially Connecticut and Miami; but the women’s games were a whole other level of awful. The good news there is that the LSU-Iowa title game and the eyeballs Caitlyn Clark brought to it shined a light on just how terrible the women’s game has always been officiated.
NCAA membership and its many committees need to sit down this summer and decide whether or not they want to be serious about this issue while they count their football money and wait for the feds to somehow fix all the problems they themselves created related to NIL.
I’ve written here before about some officials working way too many games and the fatigue and preparation concerns that come with it. The NCAA doesn’t just need better officials; it needs more of them across both the men’s and women’s games. No one’s going to want to take on the coat of doing away with the use of independent contractors and paying — and training — officials as NCAA or conference employees. Hell, the NFL doesn’t even do that. But maybe that’s where a discussion should start.
There, and with the concept of accountability. Now, there is very little front-facing accountability. Every week, conferences ‘fess up privately to coaches about how much the refs messed up. Only occassionally and in extreme cases is anything made public. When Purdue got cheated at Northwestern, nothing was said. It took egregiously bad officiating literally costing Rutgers a win at Ohio State — and maybe months later, an NCAA Tournament bid (you never know) — for the Big Ten to say something.
Coaches and players have to answer for their performances every time out, but officials can have just as much say in outcomes, yet in the rare instance where a pool reporter can confront them after a gamw, NCAA policy allows for them to merely explain rules then take one follow-up question.
Maybe conferences should make their evaluations public the way AP poll voters publish their ballots. Maybe post-game coddling should be done away with.
Transparency never hurt anybody.
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