Express Word: Oregon Trails, Purdue basketball's biggest concern and more

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss this weekend’s Purdue football’s trip to Oregon State, basketball practice and more.

ON PURDUE HEADING WEST

This isn’t a Big Ten game, but Purdue’s trip this weekend to Bigfoot Country — if, you see him/her, let Matt Painter know; he may want to recruit it — isn’t a Big Ten game, but it is a dry run for conference games to come now that the league ridiculously spans from sea to shining sea.

Look, this game was Purdue’s choice, albeit a decision made in an entirely different world, and never will you see a non-conference, in-season trip like this ever again, I’d imagine. You make trips like this for showcase opportunities; this game will be on the CW, which has recreated “Walker, Texas Ranger,” apparently, so that’s cool. Make sure you check your TVs before Saturday to make sure you have the channel.

It was kind of the Big Ten scheduling powers-that-be to not send Purdue west again this season, but once that day comes, a game like this weekend’s could have highlighted the challenges and pitfalls of these regular-season trips, which will tilt competitive balance. Disjointed practice schedules, arduous travel, new and often adverse climates, and on down the line. It will affect outcomes and by extension, championship races, records and Playoff aspirations.

It is the western front that will be most affected.

Poor UCLA, clearly one of the worst teams in the Big Ten, if not the worst. The Bruins have to go to Penn State and Rutgers, in the span of three weeks. A trip to Nebraska will feel like a stroll across the street. They’ll lose all three of these games, travel and routine being only part of the story.

Purdue needs this game and can’t fall prey to the stuff that befell Jeff Brohm’s team when it went to Nevada or the stuff that befell the 2009 team after it went to Oregon.

This is will be a mettle test for the Boilermakers, a chance to put aside a bunch of stuff, both with the logistics of this trip and the baggage from last weekend’s historic loss, and just show up and put their best foot forward. I thought Purdue coming out of that rain delay and winning at Virginia Tech last season really was one of those moments; it didn’t turn out to be, but Purdue needs that sort of response here to at worst establish a pulse for the rest of the season.

It is a long season, yes, but you can’t deny the slippery slope that sets up here, with a hot Nebraska team coming in next week, then murderer’s row from there on out.

I never use the term “must-win” because no matter what happens in any sporting event, life goes on, but this is a big one for Purdue.

And to wrap this up, a nod to the equipment-truck crew, the real heroes in all this who never in a million years would have ever thought they’d be making trips having to consider the very real possibility there might be bighorn sheep in the road.

ON PURDUE BASKETBALL

Monday, Purdue starts practice. Officially.

It will start a season that will test culture to a certain extent. It is highly unlikely complacency is ever an issue for this group after it played for a national title last season, but there are some nuts-and-bolts-of-the-game types of things that have to hold strong.

This year’s buzzword, at least on this site: Rebounding, rebounding, rebounding.

Zach Edey’s rebounding is irreplaceable. Zach Edey’s presence is irreplaceable. If there was a metric in basketball for rebounds created and not just rebounds gotten, Edey would have averaged in the 20s last season, and that says nothing of all the fouls he drew on blockouts/attempted suplexes.

Thing is, Purdue was a solid rebounding program before Edey and even in that one season it didn’t have a dominant big man: 2009.

This Boilermaker team is going to have to be a really good blockout team, and really good at going and getting the ball, simple as that may sound. It needs Myles Colvin‘s and Camden Heide‘s athleticism to be amplified by tenacity. We’re going to harp on those two all season, not to be obnoxious, but to underscore their importance. Will Berg‘s physicality is going to have to show up. If him throwing his body around creates a gap for Braden Smith to come in to snatch a rebound, that’s all that matters, that Purdue got the ball. Daniel Jacobsen, same thing. If his plastic-man arms keep a ball alive to ultimately find its way to Fletcher Loyer, cool.

Rebounding is culture. For a generation, Purdue has made rebounding in practice an Octagon sort of exercise, leading to more black eyes and fat lips and poked eyes and lacerated foreheads than anyone knows.

This year more than ever, it’s going to loom large.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• The Big Ten schedules comes out today, and that brings to mind a point I’ve been meaning to make.

These four West Coast teams are in for quite a welcome the first time USC has to play at Rutgers or Purdue or Michigan State or Indiana. Big Ten homecourt environments are a whole different animal.

There are no more games in front of 2,000 people at Stanford. It will be fascinating to see the new four’s road records in conference play this season.

• A quick, broad non-specific thought about this 2025 recruiting process for Purdue basketball …

The big-sell opportunity here in the short term is to come in and be part of what’ll likely be a great team.

In terms of early playing time, you’ll get what you earn, but as of this moment, the depth chart would seem kinda stuffy with proven players at every position but center and maybe forward, though those two positions are due to shake out this season.

This is not a class where Purdue should be looking for the long term over the short term, but that dynamic does exist for the recruits themselves. Kids want to play, and while I doubt it would cost Purdue any recruits, it may be something for some of them to look at.

But this is also part of how the recruiting process serves as a filter for Matt Painter and Co. If a player chooses Purdue to win right away more than he does to play right away, then his career is off to a solid start in terms of fitting in.

• It’s great how many charity exhibition games are being played this coming season, including Purdue’s trip to Creighton.

Everyone should be doing this, not just for the good that can come from it, but because of the team-development benefit. That trip Purdue made to Arkansas last season worked out beautifully, just an example of how such things can really help teams in the long run.

Kudos to those coaches secure enough in themselves to not fear the optics of losing a game that doesn’t count.

• Shout out to Woj, one of the legendary news-breakers in sports media history, a great career that brought with it the unintended consequence of what sports media has become.

Twitter made us all stupid. Its early popularity compelled newspaper and broadcast media alike to bypass the destinations that people subscribe to and advertisers pay to be featured on, to take information for free to be paid in empty likes and only slightly more valuable retweets and shares. It undercut a world where the best, most well-curated and perspective-based, but paywalled, information gets a fraction of the traction — oooo, that rhymes — that online take-culture and groupthink does. (I can tell you that the knowledge gap between people who subscribe to this site and those who comment on our social media platforms is enormous, with some exceptions both ways.)

In some of the post Woj-retirement coverage came the revelation that he wanted some normalcy in his life, to be away from his phone every now and then.

The consequence of not showering with your phone? An agent handing you information at the same time as another reporter and you tweeting it a few seconds late.

Whether that’s consumers creating that urgency or the media monoliths, I don’t know, but first does not equal best and social media clout is not legal tender.

This is not Woj’s fault, but he has been the perfect avatar for this completely broken and utterly stupid media climate.

(Am I bitter about this? Little bit.)