Three Thoughts From The Weekend: Getting the House in order, Purdue recruiting and more

GoldandBlack.com’s Three Thoughts from the Weekend column, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind.

ON THE PROPOSED HOUSE SETTLEMENT FALLOUT

The NCAA has proposed its new world order to settle the House case and the broad tenets of it — it is pending finalization, mind you – is that for most stakeholders, hey, this would kind of suck.

For the athletes, it brings regulation. Right now, it’s Studio 54. Anything goes with NIL. Revenue sharing will be capped and NIL, theoretically, policed. Welcome back to the days of old-school cheating.

Yes, more athletes will make money and not just the elites, but for a lot of athletes, that benefit is going to be weighed against the jeopardy their sports may be put in. Call a spade a spade here: Schools that don’t have money to burn or long-held commitments to certain sports, they are going to have hard decisions to make and some will wind up with blood on their hands.

For the power schools driven financially by football and men’s basketball, this move to 34 baseball scholarships/roster spots or 28 for soccer, forget it, especially at schools (like Purdue) that don’t have championship infrastructure. That says nothing of whatever money you might want to allot to pay those athletes, but that should be the least of those sports’ concerns.

Title IX decisions/court rulings will ultimately guide some of what schools do, but this all would come with ostensible obligation to invest to the max in your moneymakers, then competitively kneecap others by either not funding the full allotment of scholarships or sharing any revenue. The unintended consequences of this for many of those who’ll go pro in something other than sports could be considerable.

The early cocaine era of NIL was poorly managed, which is to say completely unmanaged.

But it was awesome for athletic departments because it was expense offloaded. You didn’t have to pay your athletes because other people were. In a roundabout way, you were the big winner here. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to get people to pay your players without compromising those $100-million operating budgets.

Now, let’s say it’s $22 million. That’s a buzzcut, not just a trim. The money’s there. It’s always been there, but it’s always been tied up in largesse. Football’s senior associate offensive analyst for downfield blocking angle generation may have to do without his administrative assistant now. Basketball may have to go five years in a new locker room and not four.

I’m being glib, when the reality is that people will lose jobs or take paycuts over this. Smaller sports may be as likely to lose opportunities as they are to gain them. If I’m understanding all this correctly, that’s my read anyway.

Meanwhile football getting 105 roster spots/scholarships goes against the very game-changing development that happened so many years ago. The 85-scholarship limit gave more than just Alabama and Michigan and Texas a chance. Now they all can get 20 more players who’d have gone to Michigan State or Maryland. Meanwhile, Purdue can take 20 more kids who would have gone to Bowling Green, when no one — no one — needs 105 football players on scholarship. No one needs 15 basketball players on scholarship. (In track, you just signed over to Arkansas the ability to put the 10 fastest sprinters in America on full scholarship or SMU the top 10 throwers of heavy stuff in the world. Then the NCAA Championships comes down to those two.)

The portal came at the right time to balance this out but can you imagine what the transfer market is going to look like when every football team has 50 players not playing? Being on a college football or basketball team can be a job, though, a damn good job. Chances are, many of these young folks will take paycuts in their first jobs. As long as a coach will have you in you’re the 12th man, dig those heels in.

That’s the big winner here, that guy. And the person who might get the 15th scholarship on a track team, at those schools who’ll go that far. How many of those programs exist north of the Mason-Dixon, I have no idea.

This isn’t final yet and no one knows how this is all going to play out, but the basic framework of this seems to be taking shape and could create fewer winners than losers, if you ask me.

ON PURDUE RECRUITING

Purdue’s early Class of 2026 net has now largely been cast with a slew of new post-July offers. Whereas I think the 2024 and ’25 classes might turn out to be more glue-oriented by sheer virtue of the stars Purdue will have in place, ’26 might be the class where there have to be some real dudes brought in, a highly influential class from Day 1.

Any class that comes on the heels of a multi-year point guard leaving qualifies. Braden Smith won’t wind up having a career at Purdue; he’ll have had an era. Matt Painter may not necessarily need another four-year starter post-Smith, but if you’re into striking while the iron is hot, the iron will never be hotter.

Ditto for your next next alpha shooter post-Fletcher Loyer and you’re next post destination post-Trey Kaufman-Renn. Yes, I know there will be good players in the programs who can grow into great ones, but this far out, it’s always best to look at future needs in the context of what you are losing at the same time.

Purdue will have great players to replace, three of ’em, so if the Final Four is going to help, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

ON PURDUE AND THE TOPIC ABOVE

Same as everyone else, Purdue is going to have unpleasant decisions to make once the new revenue-sharing model comes into play.

First off. there’s not much of a decision to make in terms of the estimated $22-million salary warchest. That’s a competitive obligation at this level.

But if I were Purdue, knowing full well you have to raise every dollar that pays for every scholarship, I’d cap the football number at 90, give men’s basketball the 15 only on as-needed basis — a safety net If over-signing bites you, as it almost just did — and keep everyone else more or less as is.

And I’d identify my priority sports, communicate priority, invest accordingly and set expectations accordingly.

Being practical here, your big four are football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and volleyball. They are the priorities. After that, golf has a history and an elite course. Swimming has an Olympic track record and a solid infrastructure. Tennis has a new building and limited overhead.

Conversely, baseball has a new stadium and a decent following, but significant competitive headwinds. Wrestling has a lot of mouths to feed and Title IX numbers constantly hanging overhead. Softball is tough competitively, more so now than ever. You’ve never won a Big Ten title there. You think it’s realistic to beat out UCLA now? It’s not. Soccer has long been a ratios game more so than a realistic opportunity to win big, especially considering who you share a state with. Track, you don’t have a great recruiting base and you don’t have great facilities, but you don’t need massive investment to keep producing the occasional star.

The good news is Purdue doesn’t have a ton of sports and to be brutally honest, not a ton of traditional success to protect outside its big four.

There’s going to be a lot of money to be spread around, but also a lot of strategic thinking to be done. There are going to be winners and losers.

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