Express Thoughts From The Weekend: Exhibition value, QB play and more

Gold and Black Express’ Three Thoughts column, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind.

ON PURDUE BASKETBALL

Failure is kind of the point, you know.

That’s the bottom line from No. 1 Purdue’s exhibition loss at No. 9 Kentucky Friday night.

Did the Boilermakers get exposed at times by UK’s athleticism? Sure. Breaking news: Kentucky is athletic.

Was that the whole point? Yes.

Remember when Purdue worried about its ability to handle the ball against pressure, so it scrimmaged against Bob Huggins every year? It’s the whole point, same as it was with Arkansas, same as it was with Creighton as Painter transitioned into having to defend without Zach Edey.

No, Purdue isn’t as long and athletic as Kentucky, which is to say Purdue is not top 1 percent in America in length and athleticism.

But length and athleticism wasn’t the reason Purdue missed double-digit open threes.

The process is the point, not the party, and at Kentucky, Purdue’s process worked.

Now to the broader question: Does this part of the process — losing on the road, again, in a game that doesn’t count, but still resonates — work for Purdue in the big picture of a season?

That’s what those who can’t look beyond the six inches in front of their face don’t grasp sometimes. It doesn’t matter that Purdue lost. It wouldn’t have mattered had Purdue won. But what happened Friday night might matter down the line.

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ON PURDUE’S QUARTERBACK ISSUE

I have no idea what occurred behind closed doors this weekend and I have no expectation anyone will tell us, but if Purdue’s coaching staff is being honest with itself, a hard, hard look at the quarterback position was in order.

Look, no one enjoys tearing down kids or harping on their mistakes, but quarterback is the most important position in sports and this is a school that has never been good at football — and will never be good at football — with anything less than very good quarterback play. Scrutiny is part of it.

Ryan Browne is a good football player, but it has become increasingly evident he is a better football player than he is a quarterback, if that makes sense. Football players go out and make plays, play with their hearts on their sleeve. Quarterbacks have to meet moments with a level head and manage situations and teams. A football player can be reckless whereas a quarterback must be responsible.

To those ends, Browne’s visceral, heart-and-soul competitive nature and high-end athleticism are Purdue’s best chance, but his live-wire nature and atypical QB profile its worst enemy. Yes, the defense busts like a water balloon against a drywall tack and the receivers drop too many passes but in two of the past three games, Purdue was the better team and should have won, only for critical mistakes by the quarterback to decide those Minnesota and Rutgers games in the opponents’ favor. Two devastating losses for a retooling program that needs positive things to happen. Saturday’s disaster against Rutgers was the Browne Experience in a nutshell: Things blow up around him, he tries like hell to make something happen and winds up making a horrific decision.

The great thing about Browne is he can make something out of nothing, but that same visceral nature comes with a toxic knack for also turning something into nothing. Sometimes that can work. But you’ve got to be really good most everywhere else. Purdue’s not.

There comes a point in time where you’ve got to manage your team for what it is and not what you want it to be, and this a team that has a hard enough time being one point better than anyone let alone the 10 you might need to bake in to account for the possibility of catastrophe. Purdue can’t overcome turnovers.

Are their other really viable options at this point of the season? I don’t know. But it was telling that Purdue went right down to the wire in camp assessing its options before publicly acknowledging Browne as its guy. He is still young from an experience perspective and things can improve, but in the short term Barry Odom and Co. ought to do some reflection on this, if you ask me.

The should take another honest look, given somebody else a chance to create a real competition, both now and for this winter when 2026 comes to the forefront.

ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL INSANITY

Money isn’t real. It is but a figment of your imagination, or so college football culture would suggest.

At Penn State, paying out the GDP of a very small country is more palatable than winning 10 games every year, but losing to Ohio State. At LSU, the governor got involved to get the least likable coach in the sport ousted, thankfully not to the cost of the taxpayers of one of the country’s poorest states. Among some of the others, the football coaching position at the state-supported University of Arkansas is open and the publicly funded University of Mississippi is about to have to pay its coach like a king if it wants to keep him. What weird dichotomies college football creates.

At North Carolina, suits pushed their AD out of the way so they could pat themselves on the back at cocktail parties, then let somebody live with their disastrous hire, because they’re not gonna fire themselves.

Florida is open and Florida State may be close behind. Texas, the Park Place on the game board, might open. And Oklahoma State and its oil money are lying in wait to play their part in the perhaps the most breakneck, glue-sniffing, panic-attack-inducing Burning Man of a hiring cycle the sport has ever seen. Hopefully our economy won’t crumble once the SEC — not the Securities Exchange Commission — ravages global perception of the American dollar. I am joking, of course. The Saudis won’t be, though, when they pull up to try to buy Mississippi State’s athletic department one of these days. I am joking, of course. I think I’m joking at least.

Anyway, these numbers, man. Do they even believe them when they’re written into contracts or are our institutions of higher learning so drunk on hubris and desperate to feed the monster that they never consider the implications?

It’s not just the expense of jettisoning a head coach, but also a whole staff, then to get a new one, and then to promise something shiny, new and not cheap to get the new guy. No joke: The total price tag on these things is that of a freaking stadium renovation.

Throw in the fact that you’re going to lose your roster to the portal and at some point these schools and their fans and boosters and state governments might want to consider the possibility that there are worse outcomes than being just OK at football.

You change coaches, you lose your team. You lose your team, then you replace that team in a matter of weeks. Those replacements are going to include a lot of one-year players, meaning you’ve got to do it all again a few months later. This is the sheer impossibility of it all nowadays that the people who drive these decisions aren’t fully grasping as they keep throwing play money around.

You wait and see. There’s a reason the University of Florida, for example, can’t build something sustainable. You get sucked into this regular churn and it’s hard, and when patience is a punchline, it’s really hard. But they just can’t help themselves.

You may be upset right now that Purdue might be barreling toward another winless Big Ten season, and that’s fair. Purdue’s upset, too. But all involved ought to be thanking whatever higher power they subscribe to that Purdue made its needed change last season and isn’t part of the drunken backyard-wrestling event this hiring cycle will be.

There will be dozens of hires, a ripple effect of seismic proportion, hundreds of millions spent — let’s not forget about the new contracts good coaches can now leverage their current employers for — and hundreds of players in the portal.

It’s funny now to think about how people freaked out about transfer freedom and NIL, then revenue-sharing, and that they’re the same people who set the tone for the whole sport with seasons like this one.