Three Thoughts From The Weekend: Transfer culture, press conferences 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, transfer culture, press conference culture and more transfer culture.

ON TRANSFER PORTAL CHURN

This week and last, Big Ten basketball programs have been gobbling up players like Pac-Man downing pellets. Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Ohio State and on down the line, they’ve basically recruited their teams for next season in the past 10 days.

Again, who knows what this league is going to look like come next fall? Seems pretty certain Wisconsin has a problem after getting decapitated by transfers, but there’s no telling about most anyone else. Purdue ought to be good. Contender good? Yeah, probably. But Illinois returns virtually no one of note, Indiana is brand new, Ohio State and Michigan are brand new. Michigan State sort of reboots now after having the same team for a few years, probably too long. There’s a window of opportunity here for Iowa and Minnesota, but it could be dependent on how those with more talent coalesce. Wild times in college sports. Is this even fun for fans anymore?

Meanwhile, football programs are back in Portal-palooza following spring ball, meaning once again they are recruiting players in late April that could be starting for them in four months. Purdue just got a new punter, an easily overlooked dire need for Year 2 under Ryan Walters.

It bears reminding how uncomfortable this all has to be for coaches, but also how hard this has to be on players.

The transfers who get winter conditioning and spring ball, at least, they at least have a basic understanding of their new team. These April-window guys are virtually no different than true freshmen in that sense. Yeah they’re older and stuff, but comfort and knowledge are essential to success. There are reasons beyond the physical that for generations, true freshmen sat and watched their first year and that pretty much every JUCO player was different in Year 2 vs. Year 1.

This stuff has to be hard.

It’s so easy to look at these rosters like fantasy teams, as if everything’s transitive. Like, “This guy is a junior, so he should play like one” or, “That player was a four-star recruit in 2021; he should be the equivalent in 2024.”

Should‘s got nothing to do with it.

I think it’s best to just look at everything resetting for everyone, same as it’s always been best to just forget about freshmen’s rankings and such once they enroll, because everything is then different.

Basketball, same as it ever was. Certain teams will win the off-season with rosters that look like world-beaters on paper, but with so much to prove once the fur starts flying.

Football and basketball alike, what the Portal Era really has done is remind of us how very, very different things can be between how they look on a Dry Erase Board and how they look on grass or hardwood.

ON PRESS CONFERENCES

So as you are aware by now, Caitlyn Clark‘s introduction of sorts to the WNBA — a momentous occasion for women’s basketball and by extension women’s sports in general, given Clark’s massive following and mainstream brand — was overshadowed at best, marred at worst, by a bizarre, unfortunate exchange with a reporter that went viral and did the impossible of uniting everyone on social media, normally a Gangs of New York-like smattering of tribes often existing at one another’s throats.

Yet, here it was, common ground between academics and the “woke” and the meatheads at Barstool and Outkick, though they communicated their feelings very differently, obviously. Legitimate media went into think-piece mode; provocateur media jumped at low-hanging fruit. Intelligent people and the armies of the reply-guy undead united following an exchange universally panned as “creepy,” “awkward” and so on. “Weird” is a useful catch-all here.

There’s no sense in repeating all this. It’s been rehashed over and over and the outrage — most genuine, some performative — was warranted. It has really shined a light on some uncomfortable truths about gender and inequities in sports, some realities about a sports media that is not representative enough, dominated by white males covering people they don’t look like and in the case of gender, perhaps not all that equipped to across the board.

Trust is important in this line of work. Not trust that the media is going to be your friend, but that it will be fair, informed to the best of its ability and, ideally, able to relate and empathize with those we cover, to better tell stories and boil things down to what’s real and not just show. We all have our different styles in terms of trying to break down walls; in this case, it went badly off the rails.

The “show” part of it is the one point I want to illuminate here that I don’t think anyone else has.

Look, this whole thing was not a product of platform, but for our purposes, press conferences suck, for lack of a better term.

Podiums and microphones and TV cameras and livestreams add a certain performative requirement to all this that really stinks for all involved, including the consumer, who’s only getting well-choreographed, often thoughtless responses from subjects just trying not to say the wrong thing in response to questions presented by reporters who know they’re on TV. The platform changes everyone in the room. I blame the Clinton Administration for being the first to broadcast White House briefings live, though emerging tech would have brought us all there eventually anyway, I’m sure.

One-on-one interviews and genuine human back-and-forths — admittedly not always practical — are better 100 percent of the time. Full disclosure, we do a lot of video interviews for the purpose of efficiency, viral marketing, transparency and revenue, but do so with the understanding of what we are doing.

Worthwhile interviews come from making one-on-one connections with people, ice-breaking and pre-existing rapport. Those things are all off the table when the interviews are literally on stage. And when one of us have our worst moments — and that’s not defending a question that has been framed as “harassment” but could just as soon have been construed as a journalistic threat, given the contextual importance of the particular platform in play — it’s clipped and tweeted all the same. You saw what happened at the NCAA Tournament when that poor kid asked Matt Painter a poorly crafted question about Utah State. And that was just a kid asking a basketball question, not a veteran tripping into matters of societal relevance.

That’s a lot of words here burying my point: If not for the show of live-TV press conferences, it’s possible this doesn’t blow up in a way that ruins one of the biggest days in the history of a whole league, gets Caitlyn Clark’s pro career off to an awkward start and so on. But that doesn’t mean that good can’t come from the conversations triggered by all this. This is coming from someone who loves women’s basketball — it was my first real beat at Purdue and learning from Mike Carmin was one of the best things that ever happened to me professionally — and has been just as captivated by Caitlyn Clark the basketball player as anyone. She bears tremendous responsibility in her sport right now; she doesn’t need cultural weight on her shoulders, too.

I’m not in the business of criticizing colleagues, but it’s no hot take to point out that this was bad, real bad. But hopefully some good can come from it.

There you go, there’s my think-piece, my bite at the apple hanging low from the tree.

ON HIGH SCHOOL RECRUITS

Purdue’s trip to the national title game served as real validation that its approach to the Transfer-and-NIL Era is both sound and probably sustainable, though not necessarily an indictment of the other way, the transfer method.

The Boilermaker program will feel it some time or another when it has a bunch of sophomores playing against a bunch of 22-year-old mercenaries, but that won’t be so acute once the COVID year finally goes poof. Also, playing against adults is the very environment Purdue has thrived in lately.

There’s no right way or wrong way, just lots of different ways.

But Purdue has benefited with its core recruits while others’ eyes wander.

The revolving-roster approach at Indiana has done IU no favors with Boilermaker priority Trent Sisley; here’s guessing that Illinois had transfers on the brain when it didn’t really recruit legacy Kanon Catchings while he was an hour away, just down I-74, long before he was a consensus top-50 player nationally.

That’s what sort of ironic — ironic? — about this. Purdue has recruited really well in its comfort zones during the Transfer Era, and now it might get even more proficient because of the Transfer Era.

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