Express Thoughts: Football’s state of things, Gicarri Harris and more

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

ON THE STATE OF THINGS FOR PURDUE FOOTBALL RIGHT NOW

Things can get better, sure, but given the shocking absence of mere positives that have come from this four-game losing streak for Purdue football, it has to make you wonder if things will or really can get better enough to matter.

It’s no one thing that has gotten the Boilermakers blown out every weekend for a month now, not even able to compete against pedestrian Wisconsin this past weekend. I was there when Wisconsin had Russell Wilson and Melvin Gordon and that was a PG-13 affair, but not all that much worse than what you saw two days ago.

If you’re looking for positives right now, you have to squint so hard you may risk your eyeballs caving in. That’s not meant to come off a cheap shot; it’s just the reality of the situation.

And the worst parts of it: The basic stuff, the tackling, the penalties, the obvious egregious breakdowns, that stuff isn’t getting better. And once Purdue has been down, it has been out. The 66-7 Notre Dame outcome was not an afternoon in which you saw much in the way of fight. At Wisconsin, a 21-6 Wisconsin halftime lead may as well have been 35-6. Purdue never stopped the Badgers again.

This stuff, the competitiveness, the discipline, the fundamentals, those are the floor-level elements you build upon. They’re absent.

You can chalk part — but only part — of this up to a portal-cycle miss by the coaching staff, a reflection of the perils of this new game being played, where a player’s best ability is simply availability.

Otherwise, the pillars of what this is supposed to look like just aren’t there a season-and-a-half into Ryan Walters’ time here.

Recruits are predictably bailing as typically happens when energy attracts them, then energy isn’t backed up with momentum. But no one recruit matters all that much right now in the grand scheme of things. They’re all just ping-pong balls in a spinning barrel right now anyway, all players are.

But decommitments are just piling on Purdue’s more clear and present problems.

Everything I personally have ever believed about college football screams patience, but this has to get better between now and December and there aren’t many signs right now it will. And even better might not matter all that much with Oregon, Ohio State and Penn State all still to come, which says nothing of much-improved Illinois and Indiana, both on the road, and both undoubtedly eager to kick Purdue while it’s down.

Things sometimes get worse before they get better and from last season to this season, they have gotten worse.

Now …?

ON FRESHMAN GUARDS

Gicarri Harris isn’t going to be one of Purdue’s leading scorers this season. He’ll make mistakes and his minutes may come and go on a game-to-game basis. He may not be the Big Ten’s best freshman, but he could be one of its most important.

Hear me out: Yes, Harris and classmate CJ Cox are going to have to give Purdue important reserve (presumably) backcourt minutes, but maybe more than that. You are going to see three-guard lineups often, I think, as Purdue covets that third ball-handling element. Harris’ defensive versatility and physical, competitive nature — rebounding, rebounding, rebounding — might make him a really logical fit to serve as that point guard/small forward concoction. That he is expected to be to make threes certainly makes him particularly playable in that sense.

Myles Colvin, I have to think, will be Purdue’s 3 and an important scorer for Purdue, but all that value that Lance Jones brought last season handling the ball and defending different people, that may not be Colvin, at least not yet. Harris is a freshman. So is Cox. So there may not be an option as perfect as Jones was.

But there is a blueprint Purdue love to again be able to fill. Harris may be its best bet.

ON MIKE BERGHOFF

After it came to be known late last week that long-time Purdue Board of Trustees chair Mike Berghoff would be stepping down after 15 years in the role, it brought to mind just how pivotal a figure he’s been in the modern era of Purdue sports.

Contrary to what people are inclined to believe when football is losing, Purdue has invested in a grown-ups-table sort of way after the disastrous Darrell Hazell years. It was Berghoff who was largely the driving force behind Mitch Daniels going along with committing to sports at a much higher level. The shame of the Hazell years didn’t hurt, either.

From that came Mike Bobinski and more of a spend-money-to-make-money approach to sports. Better facilities, more support for the money-maker programs, the Jeff Brohm hire, a well-taken-care-of and resourced men’s basketball program — the results of which should still be top of mind — all without Purdue compromising its principles in any apparent way.

Is Purdue ever going to be Ohio State or Alabama? Of course not. It’s still very much in the bottom portion of a conference flush with heavily monied programs. But at least it’s been playing the same sport the decade or so, and it was Berghoff who was instrumental in pushing it in that direction.

Things are going to change. There will be new BOT leadership and Bobinski is winding down his long career. But the floor has been raised at Purdue and the ceiling at least glimpsed a few times.

Berghoff has been a key figure in that elevation and should be viewed accordingly.