Weekly Word: Purdue’s off-season agenda, kickoff returns 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 off-season, football rule changes and more.
AN OFF-SEASON AGENDA FOR PURDUE
Soon as some clarity emerges with Zach Edey, Purdue’s critical off-season begins in earnest in June. If Edey’s back, the Boilermakers are both loaded and experienced; if he’s not, there are still plenty of assets returning and a solid history lately of Purdue thriving in these transitional-type years.
Purdue gets to go overseas for its twice-delayed international trip and gets 10 practices on top of its normal summer allotment of practice-floor time. This could be a big off-season, a positive tone already being set by the fact that only redshirt freshman Will Berg will be sidelined by off-season surgery. As of now anyway. Don’t accuse me of jinxing it.
For Purdue to be as good as it can right away next season against a monstrous schedule, the sort the Boilermakers sucker-punched last season, here are a few thoughts on some important elements to the off-season, beyond sound health, which didn’t happen last summer.
On-Boarding Athleticism
The additions of Lance Jones, Myles Colvin and Camden Heide will give Purdue a much more athletic roster than last season. Much more. Like, transformational. As long as it doesn’t come at the expense of three-point shooting, that will be a huge plus for Purdue.
The three of them need to learn quick and really show up athletically both in transition on offense and especially on defense, where Purdue has to take a step. You need your best athletes to be plus defenders, and this trio has the potential to make Purdue not just better, but more interchangeable and less vulnerable in switches.
Establishing Balance
This applies only if Edey returns, but Purdue was too top-heavy in its offensive responsibility last season. It needs more avenues for scoring next season, whether it involves Edey or not, but a few more dynamic looks would be valuable in taking some burden off the big man around the basket and making Purdue less dependent on the crapshoots of officiating and three-point shooting.
The maturation of Purdue’s backcourt could ease this organically. Purdue will ask more of Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer, and they’ll be up to it.
Physical Gains
This goes without saying so I’m not gonna waste too much wear and tear on my keyboard on it, but conditioning is a huge deal for this team, especially for those youngsters who wore down late last season. At a more granular level, Loyer needs to get stronger and more stout, Trey Kaufman-Renn will want to downsize a bit, etc.
Confidence
As a group, Purdue might be best suited to believe its hype this season, to carry itself like an elite team. It has been up and down in that regard the past couple seasons. It’s not always matched the uppercuts opponents have thrown and inexplicably the Boilermakers looked shook in the NCAA Tournament, almost as if Tobin Anderson’s locker room yapping got between their ears. Again, inexplicable.
How much of that can be proven during on off-season, I don’t know.
BYE, BYE KICKOFF RETURNS
The NFL just followed college football’s lead in implementing fair catches on kickoffs, another step toward the eradication of the play from the sport, in the noble name of player safety.
It should have done one better and just removed the kickoff altogether now. We all know where this is going. Why wait? By tweaking these rules to acknowledge that these are particularly dangerous plays — I don’t have data, but I do have both eyes and just enough understanding of force and physics and such — as part of an inherently dangerous sport, I’m not sure it’s a great look to just tweak rules as football creeps closer and closer to its existential judgment day when it comes to concussions and other safety issues.
Angles get people hurt as much as speed and impact do, and the kickoff has always been different from most other plays in that sense. Football is going to be dangerous no matter what. It’s the cost of doing business. But if you’re serious about making the game legitimately safer and the writing’s on the wall about where things are going, half-measures are just going to lead to someone getting hurt bad and your hand being forced.
Understand: Special teams are many, many players’ path to spots on NFL rosters, so changes here will cost people jobs. But when there’s that motivation at play, do you think the 44th man on the 53-man roster is going to go out there thinking “fair catch”? Is that blocker on the boundary going to lay up on that crack-back that, to the best of their heat-of-the-moment knowledge, might spring a big play? Or are they going to do the opposite?
Purdue Flag (Photo: Chad Krockover)
RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK
• Maybe things work out for him — you never know — but it’s difficult on its surface to look at former Purdue quarterback Michael Alaimo as an example of the perils of the Transfer Era in college football.
The former well-regarded recruit pinned his name up on the transfer board for the second time — first under Jeff Brohm, at a time when Purdue just needed bodies at quarterback, and then again about a month after Ryan Walters’ hiring — and this time, he was gone for good. Whether he was a priority to keep for Walters and his staff as they overhauled their roster, I don’t know, but it’s a fair assumption to assume he was not, displaced by a coaching change and set adrift for months.
This week, after seemingly fielding only low-major and FCS-level offers, Alaimo committed to Kent State. By the way, it’s late May. He was a free agent for almost five months, before landing at the sort of school being cannibalized these days by transfer culture, NIL, high-major scheduling shifts and the simple economics of college football. He was obviously a missed evaluation by Purdue’s prior staff and the recruiting-ranking industry alike, but that’s a hard fall, especially when you take into account his shot at a degree from Purdue University after three years of classwork just went by the wayside, all due respect to Kent State. There’s no such thing as a bad free college education, but some are more revered than others. As someone who grew up virtually in the same as Alaimo, I can tell you Jersey people hear the word “Purdue” and believe it to be Ivy League. (Surprisingly, my state’s counterfeit-diploma industry has yet to really take off.)
This is a whole different game right now, with NCAA athletes now holding unprecedented freedom of movement and earning potential. There are going to be lots of winners in that landscape, but also lots of the opposite end of the spectrum.
• This recent spat of gambling-related concerns around college sports was inevitable as soon as betting on sports started becoming as easy as getting Target to ship you undershirts or placing a call-ahead order from Chipotle.
It also raises this question: What happens when FanDuel and DraftKings and their contemporaries come at the NCAA with corporate sponsorships in mind? It’s inevitable, and one of the next financial frontiers for organizations driven by revenue-maximization and historically up for anything values-wise when it comes to money.
There once was a time when the NCAA would have set events at the Chernobyl site before Las Vegas. Today, there are preseason college basketball events held every year in casinos — I’ve personally covered tournaments at the Orleans as well as Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun (twice) and the off-shore Atlantis — and Vegas is getting a Final Four. The pros led the way on that, with the Raiders’ move most notably.
Betting sites have already quietly executed a bloodless coup of sports media, pouring jazilions into advertising and shaping the way games are discussed. Turn on sports talk radio anywhere in the country or any numbers of sports podcasts and you’ll see.
There once was a time when alcohol and alcohol-related advertising were content-non-grata at college events. That has obviously changed.
So now what happens when Caesar’s offers the NCAA a billion dollars to replace Lily from the AT&T stores during the NCAA Tournament? Or FanDuel tries to cozy up to the CFP. Or whoever it may be makes BTN/Fox an offer it can’t refuse?
• OK, so tell me this: If the federal government somehow gets its bureaucratic tentacles into the NCAA with NIL reform, are there boundaries to that relationship? Are people going to run to Lindsay Graham or James Clyburn when South Carolina gets called for an inordinate number of personal fouls against Tennessee?
It’s ridiculous it came to this, but also kind of fitting that the two most dysfunctional organizations I can think of right now are getting intertwined. When I first thought years ago about the prospect of the Department of Education getting involved in all this, it seemed so dystopian. Here we are.
Just what the federal government needs to be doing right now, or ever. Using our tax dollars to police Texas A&M’s boosters’ dollars.
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