Express Thoughts: The losing streak, digital life 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’S LOSING STREAK

Look, Purdue is a good team. It has too many good players who’ve won too many big games and as solid and reliable and solution-oriented a coach as you’ll find. It has shown enough at times this season to validate itself as a really good basketball team, but sometimes really good teams at any level of any sport have bad weeks or hit ruts.

That’s where Purdue seems to be right now. It may be a really good basketball team, but right now it is not a particularly composed, detailed or focused basketball team. That’s hard to explain beyond the general nature of young people performing in a highly scrutinized, highly pressurized environment.

Whatever the case may be, things have changed. The Big Ten title — not as big a deal as it used to be in this bastardized Big Ten, but still a really big deal — is out of the window, and Big Ten and NCAA postseason seeding implications come into play here, on top of questions of just how slippery this slope is, because UCLA can absolutely, positively come into Mackey Arena Friday and win. Purdue has to get right, but it had to get right after each of the three losses prior to the game at IU Sunday and the second-half slips continued.

In a normal season, a four-game losing streak — three of four on the road — wouldn’t be cause to call in the national guard. But the level to which Purdue has raised expectations both for itself and around it, the shock value that now comes with this stuff really is a good problem to have, I suppose.

Here’s what I know, though: There’s plenty of things to accomplish in the postseason now, and Purdue is now going to be viewed as something of an underdog, a role that this program has often been at its best in. The amazing thing about last season was how those guys handled the weight of the piano of expectations strapped to their backs all season long. This team had an opportunity heading to Michigan to win the Big Ten and maybe get a No. 1 or at least No. 2 seed, got a raw deal in that game and hasn’t been the same since.

These aren’t personnel problems. Purdue doesn’t have as perfect roster, but it didn’t in January, either.

These things can turn quick.

ON THE DIGITAL WORLD

So, last week, a prominent Purdue player was readying to do a group interview before practice when a bystander made a joke about what “Twitter” thinks.

The player’s demeanor changed and the ensuing interview with a suddenly agitated young person was not so good, shall we say.

Shortly thereafter, chatting with a staffer, an inane tweet they were tagged in was brought up without prompting.

These were some of at least a half dozen moments the past week or so in which “Twitter” has been brought up either by a Purdue player, by Matt Painter (though some in the context of the Indiana job) or in questions from media. Painter is correct when he says the trolls are not reflective of a school’s fanbase, but I don’t know if you guys have noticed or not, but the trolls in culture these days are winning.

It’s easy to say, “just block it out.” But the stuff finds you, and many of us have just enough masochist in our DNA to not be able to look away. It is really hard being a young person nowadays. No one from this generation is getting sent to Vietnam or anything so don’t misunderstand me, but the constance of the digital world in which this generation has grown up, it’s hard.

I know better than most, because the nature of my silly job requires me to exist in the same spaces and as someone who faces a fraction of the acidity that these guys do — FanDuel isn’t laying odds on me spelling words correctly — I can tell you it has taken a real toll over the years. As someone with a self-destructive tendency to shoot first and comprehend later, it is really hard to not to go scorched earth and really easy to go to bed angry like I too often have and life’s too short for that crap.

Now, put yourself in players’ shoes. They live on Twitter and Instagram and whatever else, as do friends and family. People aren’t going to just stop acting like sub-humans on the Internet and the booming engagement-farming industry is here to stay and our current media apparatus is too willing to platform fools.

I can only imagine all the things I used to yell at my TV about Alex Rodriguez during postseason at-bats being not only published but immortalized digitally.

Again, it’s easy to say just block it out, but that’s easier said than done for people who live online. Painter’s in-season Twitter ban from years back was never really practical, but it was well-meaning, even as Purdue, like every other program, used the platform to stoke excitement and enhance its brand.

This is not a Purdue-specific problem; it is a cultural flaw that is not going away. That Purdue does have some highly influential players who’ve been shaped as players and people by slights maybe makes it a bit more combustible, but the last thing Purdue can afford to do now as it struggles is bathe in negativity. But in times like these, sometimes that’s all there is.

ON CONCENTRATION

This word keeps coming up — hey, you know what part of our beings social media tends to adversely affect? — and that falls under the umbrella of poise and composure and all the things that should be by-products of experience that just aren’t panning out right now.

Purdue was so good on defense last month, and so good taking care of the ball, because it was detail-oriented, energized and composed. Those things, it stands to reason, can go sideways with fatigue of both the mental and physical varieties.

Notice how Purdue has taken Braden Smith off the ball more of late and actually removed him from each of the past two games, albeit briefly. He’s had so much on his plate all season, and it’s always a fine line with players like him balancing their emotion with the focus needed at that position. Same for Trey Kaufman-Renn, but different. Every post scorer over the years has had to perform while also playing through frustrations with officiating. There have been moments lately where it seems to have affected him, and I can’t say he was wrong. The Michigan game was an abomination, and that’s where this whole slide began.

Anyway, Purdue just has to get its clarity of mind back.

This stuff can turn quick.