Express Thoughts: The Football Portal, and hoops offseason success

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 PORTAL-MANIA

So this weekend basically represented the majority of Phase 2 of Barry Odom and his staff’s total makeover of Purdue’s 1-11 team from a year ago, and while it’s confusing and chaotic and as near total teardown of what people are used to, you gotta admit: It’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Look, until any of these players do anything, they can really only be assessed in the abstract and the abstract makes all things possible. It’s hope. The amassing of sheer numbers isn’t a coach “cookin'” or whatever. It’s due procedural. You have to fill a roster, so every year the news is going to come fast and furious, as coaches work themselves to death and do their best just to do their best.

There’s no guarantee enough of these guys hit to really transform Purdue, which is not a Purdue-specific reality. It’s everybody’s reality. But there’s no reason to think they won’t either.

This is a grand spin of the roulette wheel and while Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Oregon are always going to have better players than everyone else, the rest of the Big Ten’s chances of hitting big aren’t much different than the next guy’s. The grand prize: The chance to be 2025’s Indiana.

Again, all things are possible, even when you’re starting over like Purdue is.

The presumed talent that comes with the Georgia envoy outweighs the baggage some of them bring from Athens, where there’s this weird reckless-driving culture down there that players need to get away from. I don’t want to use the work “risk” because I don’t know these players, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to to accumulate difference-making talent. And unless there’s a distinct pattern of behavior or a clear and present threat to anyone’s safety, everybody is entitled to a second chance, especially in an environment like this, where if things don’t work out, you just clear it all out. The portal is not just a resource, but also an antiseptic. It’s a hole where you can bury problems, to put it as explicitly as possible.

But again, there’s unknown with all these stuff, and when you’re in Purdue’s situation and wanting to make sure you don’t lose your grip on fans’ and donors’ hearts and minds, anything interesting and anything positive is a good thing, and the unknown is always perceived positively until proven otherwise.

The players are going to change every year, and this is ushering in a new era of coaches and systems mattering as much or more than the roster. All these sports have always been players’ games, but now it comes down to coaches and their staff’s acuity, organizational ability, adaptability, resourcefulness, etc.

The on-going portal haul gives fans reason to hope for the best, but ultimately, their faith has to lie most in Purdue having gotten the right guy in Barry Odom.

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ON ASSESSING OFF-SEASON SUCCESS

Now that the college basketball portal is closed and the game of musical chairs mostly complete — mostly — the discourse around the sport will turn to the question of, “Who won the portal?” It’ll be a dumb conversation, because it will inevitably center around the teams whose hauls look the best on paper, who signed the most players, who spent the most money and who got the most recognizable names.

Here’s how off-season transactions (not necessarily portal) success should be assessed, all reasons I think Purdue might be the winner of the off-season to date.

1. Who did you keep?
2. Who did you lose?
3. In the context of Nos. 1 and 2, what did you need and how did you address it?
4. Who has the most knowns and the fewest unknowns?

This isn’t a fantasy draft, yet it seems to get talked about like it is. You’re trying to build the best team, not the best list.

This is how things should be assessed and those who look at it like this won’t have to look too closely to realize that Purdue’s spring to date really couldn’t have gone a whole lot better.

ON THE NFL DRAFT

This isn’t a take on the NFL Draft or anything or my annual comment on NFL franchises having no idea what they’re doing with quarterbacks.

I’m just pointing out the correlation here between the draft and the college football portal hurricane basically occupying the same weekend.

Anything that keeps people talking about a sport during its off-season is good for said sport, and part of the reason the NFL rules the world is that its media complex helped turn the draft into a year-round story, the zenith of that story hitting its most shameless, embarrassing worst this weekend when it came to a certain quarterback falling in the draft.

The transfer landscape in college football — more so than basketball because football starts earlier — is its version of the NFL Draft. It’s the 12-month story that peaks in the spring and immediately starts getting talked about for next year as soon as it’s done.

Time will tell if transfer culture is a positive for college football competitively, but it sure will help it keep peoples’ attention when they might have otherwise tuned out for a few months.