Express Word: College Football’s Offseason and more

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss the transactions cycle in college basketball, the prospect of five years of eligibility for NCAA athletes and more.

ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL THESE DAYS

With there still being 24-plus more hours to go in April, Purdue has turned over roughly a quarter of its football roster this month. This is in part because of coaching-change circumstances, but not a one-of-one situation in modern college football.

Purdue has added 22 players, at last count, in April. These are players, broadly, that Barry Odom and Co. aren’t bringing in just to fill uniforms but, ideally, to win. This is your roster, but better said, this is your team, the one your Year 1 outcomes will depend on.

This, obviously, is all immensely different than it’s been for generations, and so college football has to change in accordance with the conditions on the ground. This is NFL Jr. now, and should reflect that.

If the second portal window is going to sit right behind spring practice and spook a lot of coaches out of running spring ball as they normally would for fear of putting their dudes on tape, then of what use is spring ball?

This stuff needs to move to a mini-camp/summer-OTA format, non-contact teaching time with coaches in June. Coaches should push for this, so they’re not overseeing teams in August who are literally starting from scratch. Spring practice helps only a portion of the roster now.

That said, coaches need a break. They’re humans, too, and their well-being must be protected. This can’t be a 100-miles-per-hour, 52-weeks-a-year deal, which it’s getting dangerously close to considering the June recruiting fury brought on by the December signing date, then the two portal windows.

But these kids changing schools, they need to be prepared. The goal here still has to be success for as many of these players as possible and preparation yields success. These 20-some players who committed to Purdue in April, three months before training camp, need a foundation. Same as it is for every other school out there and their spring transfer.

The practice/hands-on coaching calendar ought to be totally torn down and re-written in accordance with the times.

ON PURDUE BASKETBALL’S BIG TEN SCHEDULE

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: In this weird new Big Ten, stretched way too far geographically, with too many games crammed into too short a season, with TV wielding too much influence, schedule draws will guide outcomes and ultimately decide championships.

That makes the off-season pairings announcement especially significant, with two qualifiers: 1) There’s never an easy Big Ten schedule and 2) nowadays, who really knows who’s going to be good and who isn’t going to be good?

That said, Purdue got a great draw on Monday, greasing a path perhaps to the Big Ten title the Boilermakers will be favored to win, even with the unknowns of several wholly turned over rosters and four new coaches.

Iowa and Wisconsin being Purdue’s two non-Indiana double-play matchups isn’t cake, but it could have been worse. Of course, we’d have said the same about Michigan last season not knowing the Wolverines would be any good under a new coach. Iowa could be a similar deal under Ben McCollum. Wisconsin is transfer-heavy again, so who knows, but they were transfer-heavy last season, too, and won easily in Mackey Arena. The rivalry protected Indiana home-and-away is what it is. It’s never easy in Bloomington, but IU is rebooting yet again, so we’ll see. “New” always carries lightning-in-a-bottle potential.

No one knows about this league. Purdue is the most known commodity, by a mile. But I think we can safely project a top group of Purdue, Michigan and the European Union of Illinois, plus assume Michigan State will figure out a way to figure it out.

Of those three, Purdue gets all of them once, all of them at home, and the same for Oregon.

But there’s also a really important dynamic to all this that’s still to be determined.

It’s not just who you play, but when you play ’em, and you’re sick by now of me writing about this, but I don’t care because it’s true: How television and the Big Ten craft the schedule is a really big deal and being a must-see-TV team is a great thing, but a good problem to have. Purdue’s run of five straight three-day turnarounds bracketed around both its coast trips last season was absolutely unacceptable and should never happen to anyone ever again. But TV gets what TV wants. Hopefully for all 18 teams in this Fox Corp. of a conference, the competitive integrity of the season will be protected at all costs in such decisions this season better than last year, which was Year 1 of an 18-team league spanning sea to shining sea, with too many media parters to appease.

If this stuff is unavoidable, then perhaps the 20-game conference schedule has outlived its usefulness.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• I don’t know how this became a thing, but one full-grown gorilla would destroy a hundred unarmed men. There, I said it. If you think different, go to the zoo and check out a gorilla.

• I don’t know much at this point, but do want to express some excitement about our On3 Sports partners acquiring Rivals.com, a company we were part of from the ground floor and have nothing but respect and affection for.

Business is business, though, and consolidation in this industry has been needed. We — as in the business — have been stretched too far, kinda like Big Ten basketball, watering down the whole.

We all benefit from strong brands from credibility perspectives, and professionally, the less brand confusion is out there and the less brain drain at work, the better.

• Certainly wishing well to Kydran Jenkins in the NFL, but it’s a reminder of these perilous, complicated times for college football coaches that Ryan Walters felt compelled to played him at middle linebacker last season with his NFL hopes in mind, just in order to keep him out of the portal. Jenkins wasn’t drafted, nor was he signed to any sort of contract. He’ll try out for the Carolina Panthers.

This after Purdue played one of its better assets out of position most of the season last year, to the detriment of a defense that was absolutely dreadful and loomed large in the Boilermakers going 1-11. It didn’t take long to recognize what a square in a round hole Jenkins was playing in space and running sideline to sideline. That move was a disaster for all involved and it’s too bad.