Column: Size may fix everything for Purdue, college basketball issues and more

In our weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we explore the what might be Purdue’s saving grace in 2025-26 and much more.

ON PURDUE’S POTENTIAL ELIXIR

Purdue was really good last season. That needs to be said before diving into its problems a year ago, problems that didn’t bar it from being really good, but did cap what it was capable of.

Of all things: Size.

The Boilermakers were prohibitively small and that limitation probably cost them championship viability.

Now, there are more questions about this Purdue team than I think the hype machine recognizes, but the questions are, well, smaller than they were last season.

Adding Oscar Cluff and welcoming back a transformed Daniel Jacobsen at center might — might — just automatically fix everything for Purdue. Just by having someone like either of those players on the floor might just transform everything around them, just like that.

Make no mistake: Players have to get better, try hard, learn, have productive attitudes, etc., but it really may just be that simple, that if everything stays the same, only with credible large humans on the floor, everything instantly raises to an April-basketball level.

Purdue had to play last season like it had a piano strapped to its back, having to scheme around an absolute black hole defensively. And it needed everyone selling out just to survive on the defensive glass. That came at the offense’s and defense’s expense, not to mention physical toll and foul worries.

Now, poof, it’s gone. A realistic possibility now exists that Purdue’s crippling deficiency a year ago now turns to nightly strength. There are many different lenses to view basketball through, one them recognizing the defensive rebound as the most important play in the sport. Keep that in mind many months from now

The summer’s important, sure, but this team was made in the spring.

ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL CHANGES

One quarter is the same as 25 cents, just like four quarters equal two halves equals one game.

If there are differences, they are minute, and so these discussions about switching men’s college basketball to four quarters instead of two halves seems pointless to me.

It would align with the NBA and overseas basketball, yes, but American college basketball is uniquely different and it’s OK to stay that way. They tell me quarters make games quicker and we all know who that matters to — television.

We’ll pay you a billion dollars to put you on TV. Just don’t take too long.

But also, TV, be careful what you wish for, because there are still commercial holes lost with fewer media timeouts. So we’ll see what comes of this, but normally when something discussed and especially when TV wants something, it happens, even when it’s dumb and pointless, like adding Puget Sound to Lake Michigan’s conference.

As a college basketball observer and enthusiast, I would not miss the one-and-one if quarters are implemented, because I hate the all-or-nothing nature of it and how a team can be penalized for doing something positive just because a 19-year-old saw a free throw roll off the rim.

What I don’t want to see is more clunky end-of-half possessions. By its very essence, college basketball is an imperfect game played by imperfect beings. From an entertainment-value perspective, this is not the NBA where you have super-soldiers who can effectively play 2-for-1 basketball. What you have more often is dudes more likely to trip on the ball because they’re moving too fast, then a referees’ huddle that takes far too long.

But it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.

If you change, you’re just changing for the sake of change. And for TV, and hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the NCAA basketball universe kept ownership over its game?

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• Here’s what the House Settlement basically guarantees now: NCAA Tournament expansion.

Yuck, I know. That will be the prevailing sentiment when 68 inevitably gets pushed northward to accommodate the Big Ten and SEC.

But revenue is king right now and the NCAA Tournament brings in the scratch.

But what the NCAA has to be sure of: Is TV really going to pay that much more for more games? I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not but broadcast media have reached a real fork in the road here between traditional television and streaming. Can more games be featured — not just televised, but showcased — prominently enough to be monetized commensurate with the required investment.

Yes, live sports are gold, but as with the Big Ten’s billion-dollar media rights deal, these networks are throwing money into an uncertain landscape, stepping out onto ground they can’t be sure can sustain their weight.

The NCAA assuming that TV has a bottomless pit of money to sweeten various pots may be as flawed a premise as the networks planning on having that money themselves.

• There are going to be coaches’ challenges in college basketball now. Cool.

Anything that can get calls right, great.

But you know who is still directly responsible for calls being right or wrong. The officials.

Over-ruling them is fine, but what’s being done to improve them?

Maybe it needs to be done by the conferences.

Fixes:
• Limits on the number of games an official can work per week and requirements on the number of hours spent idle so they can sleep or, god forbid, prepare.
• Public performance reviews from the conferences, same as the NBA provides. If schools have to publicize their injuries, why shouldn’t the people get an official’s scorecard?

I get it. If this ref can’t work as much, then you need others to step in who may not be preferred. There’s no real easy fixes to this, but is anyone recognizing a problem here?