Weekly Word: Purdue football, Big Ten expansion 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, offensive lines in the Transfer Era and more.
ON EXPECTATIONS FOR PURDUE
For months now, since the day Ryan Walters was hired, it’s been very apparent that something new was a positive thing for Purdue. That Jeff Brohm went out with a division title was the chef’s kiss on a memorable tenure with the Boilermakers but the time was right for both sides to part.
Does that mean Walters and his staff will be an upgrade? That would be a big ask. Brohm transformed Purdue football, exactly what he was hired to do. He also energized it, the area where Walters and his staff maybe can take things to a different level.
Year 1 is always important, more important now than it used to be, as the need for recruiting momentum and fan engagement (ticket sales) don’t recognize grace periods or “honeymoons.” Walters did not inherit a great roster, but does take on a reflux-inducing schedule. This will be a great tell on modern college football and a coach’s ability to just portal his way out of inherited holes, if that makes sense.
We’ll see. There’s reason to believe Hudson Card is a Robert Marve talent but no agent of chaos like the last prominent QB transfer Purdue took. But the rest of these transfers, who knows? Their respective track records are all different, there are big jumps to be made for some of them and the enduring reality to be confronted that sometimes guys transfer for reasons you don’t realize — or like — until they’ve enrolled. For all of them, presumably a steep learning curve, the sort of thing you worried about when it was two or three newcomers being fast-tracked to the field, let alone 20.
It’s the lamest of answers to say “We’ll see” about preseason expectations, but we’ll see.
Effort and energy would be great starts. Beat Fresno State. Pull an upset or three. Make a low-end bowl game.
All that would be a good start to what is very much a new start for Purdue.
Robert Goddin-USA TODAY Sports
ON BIG TEN EXPANSION
Conference realignment, the most evergreen of media day-season topics, won’t soon leave the forefront of the college football world, as the Big Ten and SEC’s collective sense of manifest destiny might be its permanent setting and every time they kneecap another conference, there’s gap-filling to be done there. Just this week, Colorado heads back to the Big 12, for which you might say CU was a Prime target following the losses of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC. Colorado is fleeing a Pac-12 that lost all of Los Angeles to the Big Ten and doesn’t have a TV deal, which is akin to a person not having a torso.
In a lot of ways, this is the Transfer Era for conferences same as their schools. In that framework, the Big Ten remains the co-apex predator and an outfit unlikely to stop at 16. It might not be a short-term deal, or it may. Predicting this stuff is the fool’s errand of all fool’s errands.
Anyway, since Power Rankings season never ends, here’s my opinion on what should be Big Ten prioritization.
Nope, not Notre Dame. North Carolina. I am aware of the contractual sticking points with the ACC, but am also well enough schooled in the ways of the world that when money’s on the line, stuff has a way of getting figured out. Send lawyers, guns and money.Notre Dame. Not sure if it will ever happen, but the fact that the Big Ten now has a relationship with NBC, if conference membership comes into play for the Irish, then it’s either the Big Ten or SEC and annual games against Michigan and/or Ohio State — and the thought of academic and geographic synergy — make it a no-brainer of a call.Virginia. The Big Ten has made its move out west. This one makes sense as an academic fit, good enough sports and a decent geographic pairing with Penn State, Rutgers and Maryland. If you can get UNC, this would be a nice package deal.Washington. This, to me, is the plum if a further westward move ever comes to be, a big-time sports program in a big media market. How much that matters right now with the new media deal already in place, I do not know. Also, mountains.Oregon. Meh. You gotta admit, though, that a full West Coast contingent would be attractive for TV, which would be guaranteed live-sports inventory into the wee hours of the morning for most of the country.Georgia Tech. I know. Not very sexy and a perpetual second-fiddle to Georgia, but who wouldn’t want in-roads in the Atlanta market. Also would significantly increase the Big Ten’s gridlock quotient.The Chicago Bears. Northwestern needs a built-in rival and I think it’s an underplayed storyline that Kevin Warren might just be playing 3-D chess here. There’s reason to think the Bears could be in bowl contention right away in the Big Ten West.Stanford: Tough sell from a sports-passion perspective, but Northwestern is very similar and hasn’t embarrassed itself in the Big Ten yet. Oh wait …
Who knows if any of these ever come to fruition? But the way the sport is going, and as much as the landscape is shifting seemingly every day, who’d be surprised if the Big Ten is the Big Twenty at some point?
Purdue Flag (Photo: Chad Krockover)
RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK
• Gonna repeat what I’ve said before after seeing him coach on the floor some this summer: P.J. Thompson is going to make an excellent, excellent coach. The Boilermaker alum and staffer is a five-star prospect in that regard. I’d expect him to be a fixture on the Purdue sideline for a long time.
You’ll see.
• After years — years — of having to look up the spelling of “Delaney” to remember if there was a second e in Jim’s name, here comes “Petitti.” Awesome!
• Give credit to the NCAA. The move to allow two more staffers to actually coach is great for the development of its next generation of coaches. My fear has been that too many entry-level coaches are being brought up in an environment where their role is to launder their staff’s impropriety, to get people coffee or to be brought up to be deal-makers and not coaches in accordance with today’s conditions on the ground.
This move also comes at a time when some best and brightest might be driven out of the business on the front end by the utter hopelessness small programs will endure amidst the backdrops of NIL and transfer culture. That was a hard life to begin with, starting out as the third assistant at Podunk State.
This staffing allowance will go down as a key moment in the careers of a lot of up-and-coming coaches, especially those connected enough to essentially have been born on second base.
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