Express Word: Scheduling absurdity, football recruiting, Purdue-Rutgers and more

Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, signs that college sports is in a far different place and more.

TOO MUCH TO ASK

This is insane.

Purdue plays at Rutgers Thursday night, then comes home to play Nebraska. Then just days after playing in New Jersey, the Boilermakers get their Oregon-Washington trip, starting in Eugene on four days rest. That’s games on both coasts in a span of six days, with a home game in the middle.

Look, I get it: Making these schedules is impossible. It’s a game of Jenga on a wobbly table in a speeding van. There are too many teams too far apart, too tight a season and the reality that the last thing anyone can ever say to television is “no,” but come on, now.

I used to call the 9 p.m. Wednesday night out-of-region tip-off the “student-athlete special” for its shameless undressing of the image that student-athlete welfare and the pretense of academic seriousness really matter.

This is worse, not just for the athletes, but competitively. Coaches have to prepare for these games, you know. Players have to actually practice. Situations like this, you can forgive a team if it shows up in body only.

It will cost teams games and anything that costs teams games will also cost someone a championship at some point.

I know the schedule is an omelette that requires more than a few eggs to get cracked, but there should be a bylaw or whatever that the cross-country trips can’t be this close together.

Illinois and Michigan have already laid down the gauntlet by sweeping their trips west.

The Illini played at Oregon on a Thursday after playing at home against Chicago State on Sunday. Michigan had a week off before traveling to UCLA and USC.

Every game matters in these Big Ten races and Purdue can really help itself by matching those teams’ two-game Pacific sweeps.

But it is set up to fail by the schedule.

WISE INVESTING

Soon, Barry Odom, his coaches and Purdue’s administration (to some extent) are going to have to make decisions on how to ration however many millions football will have to invest in its roster.

The new Boilermaker coach and those around him with say in such things will have to prioritize positions/elements/philosophies and in so doing basically codify program identify.

No one needs advice from a blowhard like me, but I need to stuff to write about, so I am going to say that Step 1 should be this: What positions/elements are the most challenging to build the traditional way?

Everybody is going to invest in quarterbacks, sure, but you can get good quarterbacks at Purdue. And quarterbacks are going to be available.

Where you need to build is the offensive line, where it is really hard to recruit at a high-level at Purdue. Your recruiting base isn’t great in that regard and when there is a really good offensive lineman near-by, here come Notre Dame and Ohio State and Michigan.

Your best bet historically has been to grab developmental guys and do a good job with them, but can you put two years of sweat equity anymore into players before getting any return? Time will tell, but maybe not.

Now, part of the issue there is offensive linemen are often academic-minded and fairly over themselves, so in the Midwest at least, you might be able to put together a pretty compelling presentation to those players if you offer more money than others are. Purdue needs Vance Vice to be an effective recruiter, as well. It has been years since Purdue had an offensive line coach who was worth a damn as a recruiter, quite frankly.

But Purdue should also have its head on a swivel at all times for giant tight ends and athletic defensive linemen who might be moved and developed as tackles, without money being part of the deal, just opportunity. How Jeff Brohm’s staff never saw an offensive tackle in Jack Sullivan, for example, I have no idea.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• I know I send like a hater here, but I just can’t over the fact that a 1-11 Purdue has now sent five players to CFP teams? DJ Wingfield is committed to USC and Damarjhe Lewis to SMU? What?

I get that the push and pull of supply and demand is the driving force here — and everyone is going all out for line depth — but come on now.

Dillon Thieneman, Max Klare and Will Heldt, fine. Those guys are good.

But these other guys and the other pedestrian Purdue players who’ve gone high-major — Yanni Karlaftis to Northwestern, Ryan Browne to North Carolina, Jaron Tibbs to Kansas State — what are we doing here?

• This Rutgers game is going to be fascinating in the sense that Purdue has built a team and Rutgers went out and bought two supremely talented loaners, Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, completely antithetical to what Steve Pickiell has done there. The Knights have two top-five NBA picks and are barely .500.

Whoever spent their money to get those guys to Piscataway — but didn’t to keep Paul Mulcahy or Cliff Omoruyi there — may not have had winning in mind.

• One other bit of food for thought in football recruiting: How much money is the best kicker in the country worth?

• Let me make this clear first off: You will never, ever hear me complain about TSA protocols while traveling. Our safety is the most important thing and these men and women are doing very important work and taking a lot of crap from people, I’d imagine, while doing it.

But I gotta say something about these new bin-feeding machines Indy and other airports have now, the ones that completely discombobulate the order in which people both go through the X-ray machine, but also come out, creating logjams at both the front and back ends of the process, and for what? Seconds? Maybe. My anecdotal observations have suggested this takes longer to pass your average traveler through, but I’m sure millions of dollars were spent on efficiency studies that would contend the opposite. On top of the millions if not billions nationwide spent on the machines themselves.

The bin-allocation process does not make us safer, so my only issue is with the inefficiency of it all.

All our bags look the same nowadays and I do genuinely wonder how many black Samsonite mini-roller bags get mistakenly walked off with by someone who’s just paying attention to the person they came through behind. Or how many iPhones wind up in the wrong hands after every gets jumbled up at Step 1 and spit out randomly for Step 2.

Anyway …