Express Thoughts: Purdue football roster flux and more

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

ON MORE GOOD PROBLEMS TO HAVE

So, Purdue is clearly going to enter the 2025-26 college basketball season viewed as an elite team and ranked accordingly. The best returning threesome in the country coupled with a masterstroke spring transactions cycle guarantee that the Boilermakers will be a preseason top-five team and the clear Big Ten frontrunner, again.

With that will come challenges the program ought to be accustomed to by now, the disadvantages borne from success.

First, the Super Bowl effect, that dynamic that has contributed to some losses and court-stormings the past few seasons. The loss at Penn State was the last of it, I thought at the time, but now it reboots.

Second, TV’s influence. It’s a big-picture positive that Purdue is considered prime viewing, but also opens it up to the reality that media partners care only about their own interests and never hear the word “no,” so if Peacock or FOX need Purdue playing five games in 16 days or whatever, guess what happens. That unforgivable stretch it got dealt around its coastal travel this past season should never be allowed to allowed to happen to anyone again. Hopefully the Big Ten and its broadcast collaborators learned some things in Year 1 about how to do this without screwing anyone over.

Further, we have no idea what the schedule will look like, but you can pencil Michigan State, Michigan and Indiana games and probably the UCLA trip for the home stretch, because that’s how TV will want it. That’s the reality for everybody good, but TV is like everybody else; they don’t know who’s going to be good. Purdue is the most known team in the league, but outside of that, TV will have to lean toward name brands and rivalries, which means tougher games, almost certainly.

It’s funny how how bad basketball got screwed by this football-driven media deal, though the billion dollars is always nice. Not only is the Big Ten spread too far geographically for all sports, but especially basketball, but in hoops, this is now a situation where you actually get penalized for success.

It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

ON PURDUE FOOTBALL RECRUITING

If you’ve been paying close attention this weekend, your head is probably spinning like a teenager who just chugged his first Guiness, as Purdue’s football roster — in late April — sweat off a bunch of dudes and added a bunch of others. After spring practice. College football transfer culture is now such that you transfer someplace for spring ball in some cases, then leave again thereafter. This isn’t good for anyone but it’s the reality for those programs who’ve undergone coaching changes.

A coaching change nowadays is like a trip to the ICU, alarms and buzzers going off everywhere, perpetual activity and desperate urgency. The goal is to just get out of the hospital as soon as possible, healthy.

As is the case for all new coaches whose predecessors were deposed, Barry Odom and his staff took on a program that just pulled up in an ambulance. It bled out almost all its players worth keeping, then necessitated a good scalpel-ing of the roster that was left behind. The Transfer IV that was hooked up in the winter steadied things some, in theory, but even some of that fluid had to be drained now. And so the cycle began anew this weekend.

My point in all this: This is insane, but the cost of doing business now when you change coaches.

What has to happen for Purdue now to build this thing right is for this to calm down in the future, for Odom and Co. to get their freshmen or multi-transfers in, develop them and keep the ones worth keeping and turn over the rest. But that number needs to get smaller every year.

Right now, you’re looking at there being dozens of new players on this roster. Many of them will come and go without their names even resonating with fans or anyone else for that matter outside the coaching staff, if even them.

Next year, ideally, this goes from four dozen new guys to three dozen on its way to two dozen and maybe one day down to a more traditional yearly turnover model. The portal is inevitable, but wholesale turnover every year doesn’t necessarily have to be.

That’s where the advantages that come with stability can be found, but it’s going to be easier said than done.

ON PURDUE FOOTBALL

Funny story here that Ryan Browne is back at Purdue after a few months at North Carolina, which I guess wound up looking like more of a try-out with the Tar Heels than anything.

Browne returns to a program that is unrecognizable from the one he left in the winter. All coaches relevant to him are gone, most of the receivers he played and practiced with and all the linemen are gone and the offense is different. For Browne to have a chance to impact Purdue now, the offense is going to have to suit him: Running to set up the pass. His one shining moment last season was largely circumstantial, sucker-punching Illinois with a different offense from that run for Hudson Card and helped by the unique advantage that came from the Boilermaker head coach and play-caller knowing the Illini defense inside and out.

I don’t know if that’s relevant context for what could lie ahead now for Browne, but I think it goes without saying that in situations like Odom and his staff are in now, you don’t get the luxury of ideal, and this isn’t ideal. No offense to Browne, but any time your quarterback picture is changing at the end of April, that can’t be good. If the quarterbacks that seemed like the pick of Purdue’s litter back in the winter — Malachi Singleton and Evans Chuba, namely — haven’t provided security enough here to keep the coaching staff from revisiting the portal, then that’s not a great sign, but nothing here is going to be easy.