Express Word: College Sports and higher education and more

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss the complexities of college sports these days and more.

COLLEGE SPORTS AND HIGHER ED

Why is everything so complicated with the NCAA? Why does every solution seem to create two more problems?

Was it the generations-long business model that flew in the face of many American ideals and in some cases laws? Yeah, sure. Is it the constant dancing around the concept of employment when many boxes associated with employment are checked? Sure. Is it that hundreds of presidents of all kinds of different schools that don’t trust one another and want advantages over each other are the ones making the rules? Of course. .

But what’s the root of it all? It’s college sports being tethered to higher education, two quite different ends of the universe that don’t always accommodate one another perfectly.

This is a piece that has really come to a head lately. Do you know of any gen-pop students in your life who attended three major universities in four years, or four in five? Sports are creating those cases, turning the concept of academic seriousness in this world into even more of a rubber chicken than it was prior. I wonder how admissions departments feel in their hearts of hearts about having 50 football players come across their desks between April and May, some of them bringing credits from multiple schools with them. Must be fun, huh? That’s college football now, coaching changes or otherwise. Can a player jump into Purdue for his senior year after three years at Ball State or wherever and walk out with a degree that says “Purdue”? I honestly don’t know, but if they can that seems like the system being gamed by the system itself and not particularly fair to all those who endured those weed-out classes as freshmen and sophomores.

What if they’re not graduating? That’s worse, because the whole point of this is to provide that very opportunity, but every undercurrent now seems to be moving away from that mission. Every undercurrent. Devin Mockobee is finishing out an engineering degree and for the past few years Caleb Furst worked toward med school. He’ll be a pediatric surgeon one day. Are coaches needing to win right now with “salary” skin in the game on players going to have much appetite for players with priorities beyond their sports? In the non-employment employment world, chances are the players dedicating the least time and energy to their non-job jobs are going to be most likely to get non-fired fired.

Again, as with anything else, this isn’t a Purdue issue. It’s the business now, emphasis on business. It’s everywhere.

This is getting to the point where at a lot of places, for a lot of coaches and a lot of kids, school is more an obstacle than a draw. But for thousands of young men and women, the old way was pretty awesome. A free education and a chance to compete at a high level. Those athletes are still the heart of all this, I think.

I’ve thought over the years that perhaps the NCAA’s, or at least the power leagues’, end game here would be a binary model with two sets of participants: Those enrolled and participating the traditional way and those sponsored by the school to compete, paid salary equal to the price of a scholarship with expenses otherwise covered, not enrolled in school but free to use their money to fund their own online education somewhere if they so choose. Those are the money players most likely to move around, and it’s up to all of them on the front end to choose their path, but up to the coaches first to decide which path to offer which players.

I could bore you with all the minutia I considered but it’s so nutty it’s not even worth me typing.

But you know, a lot of wild concepts we’d have called “nutty” just five years ago are now real.

ON TREY THOMPSON’S IMPORTANCE

So, if Purdue gets Trey Thompson, awesome for Purdue. If it doesn’t, life will go on, but it will be a disappointment given how much effort it has put in.

But here’s a quick explanation of why he’s so important for Matt Painter and his crew, beyond the fact he’s a great prospect who’s really only now getting recognized as such.

Purdue is known for being big, but while it wants to be big at center, it wants to be dynamic everywhere else. That’s the heart of motion offense and key from a floor-spacing perspective while diving into a thick playbook. Purdue has been great on offense even when it’s been big across the board, but it has done so against its preferred methods.

It wants 4 men who can dribble, pass and shoot, a la Robbie Hummel and Vince Edwards before Caleb Swanigan pushed out of position to the wing, Purdue wants as many ball-handlers, passers and decision-makers on the floor as it can get. It wants everyone to be able to move. It wants to be more switchable on defense and better suited to stop the dribble on one.

Thompson is pretty good in all those skill areas, and a great athlete and a Purdue sort of personality. Simply, he’s perfect.

It’s not just about Purdue seeing a great player, but rather a great fit in the big picture.

That’s why he matters so much.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• Watch this Zakai Zeigler case challenging the NCAA’s eligibility-window limits.

He may not win, but this is the first ax swung at the oak tree that has long been the four-year eligibility limit. When money came into this, restriction-of-trade and antitrust concepts were bound to be revisited.

Four years is a logical term because it mirrors the traditional college experience, but as noted above sports and the traditional college experience have split like a head of iceberg lettuce under a freshly sharpened cleaver. And nevertheless, there’s nothing stopping a genpop student from being in school seven years, provided admissions will allow them to stay.

This case may not succeed, but maybe it lays a groundwork for the next one which lays a groundwork for the one after that and finally someone gets in front of the right judge and wins and college athletics becomes a profession. Grad transfers used to get extra eligibility to leave for a grad degree their first school didn’t offer. But they couldn’t stay at their school for a grad program it did offer? What the hell was that? Maybe someone’s lawyer should find out.

We are a country built on free markets and unabashed profiteering. That’s capitalism, man, for better and worse.

You put the topic of choking out someone’s right to earn based on their ability and market value in front of the right judge in the right state or the right Congress in the right political climate, who knows what happens? The NCAA’s rulebook has largely been rewritten at a court’s hand; there’s a world where eligibility limits could move that direction, too.

Sounds crazy, but so did all of this stuff just a few years ago.

• Just a quick nod to the late George Wendt and a legacy built around his role on “Cheers,” a show that has aged beautifully and remained mainstream relevant to this day, even though the monoculture many of us came up in is kind of a thing of the past. We used to watch all the same shows, know all the same movies and stuff and at the risk of sounding like “back in my day” guy, there was a comfort and a cultural-adhesion to it. It gave us all bare-minimum common ground and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as our entertainment and media have fragmented, so have we.

Anyway, just a nod to the Norms of days now long gone.

• I don’t know if Daniel Jacobsen will make that U19 team this summer, but he’s an incumbent from last summer, so you’d have to think he’ll have an advantage over the younger guys trying to take his spot.

But either way, what great timing for this, for him to get right back into really high-level competition post-injury.

Purdue may have Oscar Cluff, but it needs big things from Jacobsen, too, and this should be really positive for his preseason arc.