Express Word: Purdue hoops superlatives and FB’s challenges

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss Purdue basketball winning elements, Boilermaker football struggles and more.

ON PURDUE BASKETBALL

All right, I’ve said damn near everything I can think of about this upcoming Purdue basketball season, so it’s time to just fill space by listing stuff.

Seven little things that could matter big.

• Camden Heide‘s rebounding. This is the most important thing he can do this season. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to get five or six a game and be a factor on the offensive glass, beating bigger people to the ball or just jumping over them.

• Myles Colvin‘s ball-handling. The loss of Lance Jones as Purdue’s second ball-handler is significant. Colvin, for all his talent and athleticism, is not that guy, so you are going to see a third guard snuck in there at times, maybe a lot. But when Colvin is on the floor, it can’t be a deal where Purdue feels it. As good as the backcourt is, this may be a bit more of a press-vulnerable team.

• Trey Kaufman-Renn‘s foul shooting. He’s gonna get fouled a lot and has been a coin flip at the foul line, perhaps just needing to get out of his own head at times. Under-rated about Zach Edey: A guy that big and that influential and that fouled being so good at the line. I hope no one took that for granted in the moment.

• Braden Smith‘s leadership. Again, this was the most interesting thing said from a Purdue rep at Big Ten media days, thus the third time I’m now publishing it.

“I’m just trying to be a better, trying to be more vocal, figuring out ways to communicate with different teammates,” Smith said. “I’m not great at it. (Fletcher Loyer) could tell you that. Coach (Matt) Painter could tell you that. Everybody could tell you that. But I’m working at it.”

Sometimes, perfectionists who happen to be blood-thirsty competitors don’t exist in the same world as everyone else. They may not get along as well with those who aren’t like them. They may be, at best, impatient or snippy and, at worst, toxic.

THat isn’t going to be a worry with Smith.

(Thank you, Braden Smith, for bringing this up before I did and dealt with all the ‘you’re being too negative’ static.)

• Fletcher Loyer‘s first step. This is really going to be Loyer’s first season as a featured player, but that also means his first season as an absolute marked man for defenses. People are going to try to run him off the three-point line, bringing to the forefront his ability to catch, drive and make the next play, whether that’s a pass, a pull-up or one of his funky runners. Further, he’s going to be running off a million screens this season, so his burst into his sprints is going to be even more important.

• Caleb Furst‘s energy. Why can’t Furst come into games and just try hard enough to be a bit of a Mason Gillis-ish spark on the glass?

• The freshman guards’ physicality: Both Gicarri Harris and CJ Cox are grown men physically and defensive-minded, filling in some of the gaps from the veterans they’ll be backing up. But can they spark Purdue defensively, without fouling and while being on top of things guarding off the ball? Can they be trustworthy enough right away to allow some flexibility when one or the other is playing with Smith and Loyer?

ON PURDUE FOOTBALL

The worst part of this, the reason that this brand-new coaching staff’s honeymoon period didn’t make 15 months: I think people would be put off by, but could better live with, the results if Purdue was playing the game “the right way.” What does “the right way” mean? It’s in the eye of the beholder, but penalties and poor tackling certainly aren’t.

Worst of all: The utter decimations after halftime.

That’s the worst part of all the worst parts.

The Notre Dame and Wisconsin games were decided by halftime, but decided and embarrassingly one-sided aren’t necessarily the same thing. Notre Dame won 66-7 and Wisconsin 52-6.

A team competing after halftime could have at least cleaned up the optics of those losses, as might have a staff agile enough to figure some things out in that locker room that might work. Purdue has been outscored 104-31 in the second halves during its four-game losing streak and that 31 is deceiving because some of those points just didn’t matter.

I’m not here to question anyone’s character or pride, but that’s really bad, and does give the look of a team that’s not responding to its coaches or coaches who just aren’t getting through to their team. In portal times, it raises interesting thought exercises about how invested newcomers may be or how checked out returnees may be.

Regardless, it is a terrible look for all parties and the most numbing part of all this.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• On football recruiting and these commitments backing out: In the grand scheme of things, it barely matters. The big picture matters most and things fall into place, or apart, around that. These high school kids are all just ping-pong balls in a spinner anyway.

It’s the portal. Purdue has to be great in the portal, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future. This cycle was clearly a portal bust and that’s part of this Greek tragedy of a season and a program inflection point coming on faster than a speeding 18-wheeler veering over the line at the last second.

Purdue needs to get right on the field and cool concerns over long-term direction.

Then, the other stuff will matter like it did only a few weeks ago.

• So the increasingly pointless National Letter-of-Intent, which for some odd reason we’ve always capitalized, is going away, as obsolete as the fax machines they’ve long kept busy one day a year.

In an age where athletes are bound to schools by next to nothing — begging the question of whether they ever should have been — here would be an idea for tangible commitment as revenue-sharing approaches: Nominal contractual buyouts that a school could, but often wouldn’t, hold a player to.

Put it this way: If a school like Purdue were to pay a football or basketball player, let’s say, $50,000 a year — I’m just making that up — and that’s contractually assured, then would a $10,000 release be appropriate if a player Purdue wanted to keep left? This is not servitude, mind you, but it is de facto professionalism, and it may as well be treated as such.

It’s absurd to suggest a student would have to reimburse a school to change schools, but everything about all this is absurd these days. And when a player comes in and says, “Hey, I just want to study horticulture instead, and Missouri has better greenhouses,” the school just says, “Hey, no prob.” But when Nic Scourton comes in and you know he just got more money from Texas A&M, then a protection, a modest deterrent, of some kind makes sense.

Would buyouts deter tampering? No, but they might hinder its effectiveness.

And again, schools would almost always waive this on players they don’t mind losing or that have good reason to leave or to avoid the obvious bad pub that would come with enforcement. But a paper tiger can have teeth, too.

Something to think about.