Express Thoughts: Purdue vulnerabilities, the portal 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 PURDUE BASKETBALL

Purdue’s lost three games before Christmas. It’s OK. It’s college basketball, this is normal and if Matt Painter desperately needed to be 11-0 right now he’d have scheduled accordingly, at the risk of his team sweating off too much water weight in league play.

But the foreign feeling that’s come with the Boilermakers’ 8-3 Opening 11 hasn’t been that there have been losses but that in each of those losses, the other team was just better on that particular evening or afternoon.

Let me contextualize that by adding that I genuinely believe the only team for several years now that truly beat Purdue as opposed to Purdue just spilling the pot of chili was Connecticut. Every other loss for Purdue for like three years was more about Purdue than the opponent. In my opinion.

These Marquette, Penn State and Texas A&M losses, though, were about the opponent. Those teams took it to the Boilermakers, dictated the state of play and twisted knives on vulnerabilities that have really come to light through a dozen competitions or so. All of those vulnerabilities have been covered here from one time or another, from a dearth of ball-handling at Marquette and Penn State, to Purdue actually playing young people while everyone else has semi-pros to the physicality piece of it exposed by A&M on Saturday.

Purdue is a really good team that will win a lot of games these next few months. It has already beaten a few outstanding opponents this season. But it is not unbeatable, far from it.

The model Purdue uses to build teams works but also comes with the inevitability of there being imperfect and certainly young teams every now and then. Not sure I’d call this Purdue team “young,” but no one would dispute the “imperfect” part.

The success of the past few winters should be its standard but not necessarily the expectation. It hasn’t insulated the Boilermakers of the normal ups and downs of the game. Purdue has not graduated out of being subject to the very process it embraces more than most.

ON PLAYING FAST

Purdue’s a great offensive program, one of the finest in the country, and has an excellent offensive team again, albeit an — and there’s that word again — “imperfect” one. High-end and high-activity teams full of hard-playing grown men playing together in a great system have given Purdue real problems, as they would a lot of teams.

Without every game’s singular influencer on its side every single outing, things are different.

Purdue has a lot of weapons still, but what’s its common thread? What’s its baseline of productivity, as I used to call it last season? A year ago, it was like Purdue started every game up a dozen points because of all the fouls it was going to draw and all the offensive rebounds Zach Edey and less so Mason Gillis were gonna get.

Now, is there that same baseline? Not really.

But maybe there can be.

In these past two knock-down, drag-out games, Purdue’s fast-break potency showed up, highlighting the one distinct physical advantage Purdue does clearly have: Braden Smith‘s speed and Camden Heide‘s and Myles Colvin‘s athleticism.

Purdue, contrary to popular belief, has always wanted to run, even with Zach Edey.

Now, the more Purdue can push it, the more it can foil those who want to apply full-court nuisance pressure just to slow the Boilermakers down. Maybe it unlocks Purdue’s three-point game even more. Fletcher Loyer is really good in transition and secondary transition and if you’re going to get consistent scoring from Colvin and Heide, this may be where it has to originate.

Again, Purdue has always wanted to run and get the first good shot it can find, but with these transition-optimized lineups now, there has to be an advantage, especially when Kaufman-Renn is on the bench. Maybe fast-break points suddenly become one of its signature statistics.

ON PURDUE FOOTBALL

This is all so disorienting. I cover Purdue football as a columnist and take cannon but not the granular stuff like my colleagues do. Somewhere between my time as a day-to-day beat guy and today, “Who’s on the team?” has become one of those granular parts of the job as this tsunami of transaction news envelopes most every program in America, especially those where there has been a coaching change, like Purdue.

I follow best I can but I can’t keep up, nor can the people doing write-throughs about tweets, I’d imagine.

All I know is that it seems like every would-be returnee from a team that lost every game it played for two-and-a-half months is in the portal and it doesn’t seem like any of those who could actually be part of the solution here are coming back. Maybe I’m wrong.

But Dillon Thieneman just committed to Oregon. Freaking Oregon. It’s an inflated market, man. Everybody gets over-recruited when the most important ability is availability. Few years back, a pretty average Purdue defensive line sent transfers to USC, Miami and Auburn.

Thieneman is a good player, but I think people have overlooked the fact he did not have a good season, which I can’t in good conscience point out without also pointing that he did not have a competent front seven in front of him; he did not have Nic Scourton chasing quarterbacks into mistakes; and he had a defensive system that made him into a Freshman All-America completely torn to shreds his sophomore season. But those tackles he missed this season, those were tackles he made the year before and those players will still be playing against Oregon next season. So, I don’t know.

I mean no disrespect to Thieneman, who’ll be a good player for the Ducks, positioned better to succeed when surrounded by a higher level of talent. But things got a little nuts after his freshman year when all the All-America honors and NFL talk started coming up and then created these weird optics when he was the guy who let five-yard gains turn into 50 and too often wound up being the guy who escorted opponents across the goal line. That’s just the reality of his season more than it is the reality of him as a player.

But it’s a moot point for Purdue now. He’s gone.

Now, you’d love to keep Max Klare and Will Heldt, right? But neither of those guys are going to transform 2025 Purdue into 2024 Indiana even if they do turn down big money at better programs.

The Boilermakers’ success in Year 1 under Barry Odom will be shaped almost entirely by players whose names you probably don’t know yet.

In any situation like this, you just have to hope that this time a year from now, they’re worth knowing.