Express Thoughts from the Weekend

Express Thoughts from the Weekend column runs every Monday issue, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting or whatever else comes to mind. In this week’s edition, we discuss Purdue’s inevitable ascension to No. 1, the Boilermakers’ just-completed football season and more

ON PURDUE AND NO. 1

Today, barring anything shocking, Purdue will be No. 1 nationally in the AP poll again, following its three-game championship run at the Maui Invitational, wins over three top-11-ranked teams in as many days.

This is some feat, and yes, it does occur under the cloud of the March success Purdue still aspires to, but a really special achievement.

You don’t hang banners for No. 1 rankings, but that Purdue has done this its way in this era of college basketball is kind of remarkable.

Purdue is not buying recruits with NIL money. It is not getting — or even recruiting — the supreme one-and-done talent or tampering with and stealing some MAC team’s 22-year-old best player. It’s not recreating its team every spring by grabbing its foundational players off the transfer board. Is it filling needs with transfers? Yeah. It was doing that before. But it’s not putting together pick-up teams like so many of these other places.

Matt Painter and his staff are doing it the way they’ve always done it. They’re banking on continuity and player development and evaluation and relationships. And just when the world changed and concern became valid about what open transfers and legal cheating might mean for that blueprint, that’s when the Boilermaker program went to new heights and kept doing it year after year. Has Purdue benefited from the new world order? Sure. Zach Edey probably isn’t back if not for NIL.

But in this world of Purdue playing with kids against teams full of mercenary adults or those leveraging both their slush funds above the table and below, Painter’s program has reached an elite level in spite of it. (Yes, I know there are bigger boxes to be checked come March.)

Pretty amazing.

ON PURDUE FOOTBALL MOVING FORWARD

So now what? Purdue went 4-8 in Year 1 under Ryan Walters. It probably would have been 5-7 had Hudson Card been available at Northwestern.

Year 1 is important in coaching transitions; Year 2 may be even more important.

Here’s some of what needs to happen.

Purdue needs to have a great portal cycle. It’ll lose guys, but cold as this may sound, more so guys it’ll be OK losing. It needs to add a handful of difference-makers, starting at wide receiver. Not depth guys, not warm bodies, but difference-makers. Easier said than done.

It goes without saying that Purdue can’t afford major injuries, but that’s football and not really something it can control. How much difference would Jahmal Edrine or Salim Turner-Muhammad have made this season? No idea. But next year’s transfer class needs to make more across-the-board impact.

Purdue needs its injured guys back. Starting with Marcus Mbow, and Max Klare. I’m sue I’m forgetting someone. I don’t know how likely those guys are to be 100 percent, but starting the season this year with a few important guys recovering from lingering injury was not helpful. Again, that’s football, though.

Purdue needs to have a great spring and summer in the coaches’ offices.

At the end of the season, Purdue’s offensive design and approach seemed to fit better than it did earlier in the season. They need to build off what worked and put what was a pretty lackluster offensive season behind it. I guess we’ll find out next season whether the Illinois, Minnesota and IU games were the rules or the exceptions.

The final results weren’t what Purdue wanted, but there were things to build on, for sure.

ON EXPECTATIONS

I’m going to say the quiet part out loud here, not as a comment just about Purdue moving forward, but more because Michigan State, Northwestern and Indiana are changing coaches, Nebraska and Wisconsin are just getting situated with last year’s staffs and so on.

Given what the Big Ten is about to become with the absorption of the four best programs in the now-defunct Pac-12, maybe it’s time to redefine “success.” Six wins has been a generally accepted standard, but even then an often unfulfilling one. Now, you realize how hard it’s going to be for some of these middle-of-the-pack or lower-rung programs to win six games when they kick off their seasons with pretty much five guaranteed losses? Just being real here, folks, but to use Purdue as an example: There was no way it was ever beating Michigan or Ohio State this season, so winning six would have required a 60-percent wining percentage otherwise. That’ll be a pretty standard situation for half this soon-to-be-18-team league, and I’m not just talking about Rutgers, Northwestern, Maryland, etc., but this may be doomsday for Iowa and Wisconsin and Michigan State, too. This was not a positive competitive development for perpetual-No. 3 Penn State, either.

So what happens when, let’s say, Northwestern gets Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and Washington on a schedule? What happens to the king of the Big Ten West, Iowa, when Oregon and USC are on its schedule in 2025, on top of the rest of its Big Ten slate? Purdue’s 2025 slate has Michigan, Ohio State, USC and trips to Notre Dame and Washington. I never, ever thought I’d get notes from fans wishing Purdue would strike Notre Dame from its schedules, but I have. Unthinkable, but that’s how times changed.

Look, I’m not saying things can’t flip and the last can’t be first and the first can’t be last, especially in the Transfer-and-NIL Era, but upward mobility has rarely been college football’s thing. Sometimes, success is relative. The 2017 season was the greatest .500 regular season in Purdue football history; last year, a good-not-great season was enough to win a division title.

But moving forward, I think the landscapes of the Big Ten — and SEC — will be such that the goalposts ought to move in the eyes of fans, boosters, media, administrators, etc.

And the bowls.

Let them do whatever they want, win totals be damned. This is all for TV anyway. Maybe that’s a topic for after Big Football divorces the NCAA, but in the meantime, just let the bowls take anyone open to an invite.

This applies to basketball, too. A 22-game Big Ten schedule is not a positive move, if you ask me, but here we are, thanks to bloat.

Purdue will be fine competitively. But two-thirds of the league is getting kicked where the sun don’t shine.

If winning mattered more than money, I wonder if you wouldn’t have some people (Maryland, Rutgers, Nebraska) thinking the grass may be greener elsewhere.