Express Word: Notre Dame Weekend

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss this weekend’s Notre Dame event, Purdue basketball recruiting and more. If not evident already, this is opinion content and the opinions solely of the author.

PURDUE FOOTBALL VS. NOTRE DAME

This weekend, when Notre Dame visits Purdue, the hosts will not be the story for anyone outside Boilermaker circles.

The palace intrigue that perpetually follows the Fighting Irish will make Saturday all about Notre Dame’s response to catastrophic defeat. It’ll be about legitimacy for Notre Dame, one of the few schools in college football who can lose at home to a MAC school, then still be talked about in the context of its Playoff hopes.

So, Purdue, on its home field, in a live-wire environment, gets an opportunity again to benefit from the shadows, all the pressure being on Notre Dame to not spill the pot of chili like Kevin in “The Office.” It’s the situation Purdue’s program has almost always existed in, and often thrived in, against its TV creation of an in-state rival.

As will be the case in a number of games this season, and a number of games most seasons nowadays, Purdue will be underdog enough here to just let it all hang out, figuratively. That’s how Purdue has risen to the occasion in games like this before, by throwing it all around, by taking chances, by making big plays. The past has very little to do with the present, but this game will test Purdue’s ability to rise to the occasion as past teams have, and it will test Purdue’s program’s historically signature position: Quarterback.

Riley Leonard may be banged up, sounds like, but even if he wasn’t, is he better than Hudson Card? His weapons may be; his protection might be. But I think Purdue has the better quarterback, which is very often the origin story of an upset.

Maybe I harp on quarterback play too much. People have gotten mad at me more than once over the years for assigning too much “blame,” to the game’s most important position. But … it’s the game’s most important position. And it’s Purdue’s generations-long identity.

As most every big game will be this season, Hudson Card is Purdue’s best chance here.

ON PURDUE RECRUITING

I just want to take this opportunity again to reiterate a point that I think is very important about Purdue’s 2025 recruiting class: Every one of these dudes being recruited should be viewed in the context of whether they might be able to help an elite team right away, because Purdue’s going to be climbing in some pretty thin air in 2025.

Purdue won’t need this guy or that guy to come in and start or average X points per game or whatever, but it might need them to carry a few good minutes per game, be ready, make an open shot every now and then, guard, “sacrifice” and complement Trey Kaufman-Renn, Braden Smith, Fletcher Loyer, et al. Anything more than that, cool, but the stakes are going to be too high next season for anyone to not be ready, or good enough.

How this plays out, I don’t know, but there should be little urgency here, and certainly no desperation.

Purdue, as of this day, would not seem to have any acute needs for ’25, so whereas spring would generally be considered Plan C or D, this may be a year where it could just as easily be viewed as Plan A-ish. Play this season out, see what happens, then respond accordingly in the portal. That it may not be a distinct plan right now may be a nod to how difficult it may be to rewrite the story of Lance Jones, who didn’t ask Purdue for a dime, then proved to be worth a million bucks, the perfect recruit at the perfect time.

The chances of a silver bullet like that landing again wouldn’t be great, but the option to try wouldn’t be the worst option.

The bird in hand, though. So make no mistake: Purdue would love to land Trent Sisley or one of these other forwards, and certainly Antione West.

It all starts coming to a head now.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• The Big Ten basketball schedule should be out any second now, but what we do know is that Purdue’s West Coast jaunt will include Oregon and Washington. Obviously those games will be packaged together, as all these cross-country road trips should be for everyone, and obviously Purdue would seem unlikely to fly home after one game just to turn right around. Let’s say that’s a Saturday-Monday turnaround, then that’s at least a five-day trip, in addition to the two games in three days. To put that in perspective, this all amounts to an MTE trip in the middle of the conference season.

Basketball was never the driver for expansion, but this stuff is just brutal. It will affect everyone adversely, is my guess.

Or will it?

The four new schools bear the brunt of this, because Purdue, Northwestern, IU, etc., they only have to do this once a season. UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon, this is what they do every time they play in the prior Big Ten footprint.

Meanwhile, when USC or Oregon play anywhere else in the Big Ten outside the West Coast, it will be playing in environments it likely never saw before in the defunct Pac-12. The days of playing in front of 2,000 people at Stanford in February are over.

The biggest losers in all this are the newbies.

You just wish they could have left basketball out of all this. Maybe that’s just me.

• Saturday, too, is an opportunity for Ross-Ade Stadium and this wave of enthusiasm it seems to be home to right now. There will be a great crowd this weekend and a facility that becomes a living, breathing thing, the way Mackey Arena does.

Part of building a program is building and sustaining an environment. After having damn near a full house for Indiana State, Purdue seems to be on the right track.

Notre Dame games are always events; Purdue wants all its games to be events.