Express Thoughts From The Weekend: Purdue football's solid start, basketball and more

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

ON WEEK 1 FOR PURDUE FOOTBALL

Purdue couldn’t have gotten much more out of its 2025 opener than what you saw Saturday for the Boilermakers’ 31-0 win over Ball State.

First off, the fans showed up. It looked sparse as kickoff neared, but the crowd filled in nicely, making for a pretty decent crowd. Last year’s steadfast turnout was reflective of a real football school, but this is an interesting year in that fans are being asked to believe in yet another new coaching staff — it has to get old after a while — and this time they don’t know who the players are. And the TV product gets better and better. Maybe I’m making too much of all those dynamics; regardless, Purdue needs its people, and they showed.

And they saw a worthwhile product.

It wasn’t a perfect performance, but nobody even considered the possibility it would be. But it was a good performance. Purdue looked like a credible organization. Its thousand (give or take) newcomers showed well and played hard and its returnees and quasi-returnees (Ryan Browne, namely) looked improved.

Purdue needed to be solid. That was Step 1. This wasn’t a destination. Be wary of the fool’s gold that September buy-game wins can represent. But it was a good start, a great start, actually.

The little stuff was big. The line play was strong, the kicking game was perfect and the tackles Purdue missed were generally missed at top speed, an acceptable problem to have. When you miss a sack because you over-ran the play, there’s a conversation to be had about whether that’s even a negative play provided things don’t go to hell because of it.

The quarterback has plenty of room to grow here, but Saturday suggested Browne has a play-caller that knows what to do with him and a cast around him that has some potential. Some of those receivers looked ready to roll and an offensive line that got old and experienced overnight thanks to the portal was pretty, pretty good.

It’s just one game and one game does not a season make. But top to bottom, on the field and off the field, this went about as well as you could have hoped.

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ON PURDUE BASKETBALL

Two seasons ago, Lance Jones endeared himself to Purdue World in a way you might have never thought possible for a one-year player at a program accustomed to winning with homegrown teams. Zach Edey was the driving force on that team, but Jones was its beaming face.

You may never see a story like that one again, but I’m here to tell you that in a very different way, there are similar underpinnings now with Oscar Cluff, who is bound to be a fan favorite around an arena that tends to respond favorably to unabashed, egoless, grateful grinders driven by winning. That’s what Purdue saw from the big man this summer: Not just a guy who carries the proverbial lunch pail, but one who’ll hit you in the face with it over a defensive rebound.

Perfect recruit at the perfect time, just like Jones was.

ON MEDIA INSTITUTIONS

In light of Lee Corso signing off this past weekend after being part of the revolutionary “College GameDay” since 1987 — 1987! — it brought to mind what college sports are losing in Corso and eventually Dick Vitale, and how things have changed.

The two live-wire Italians were incredible advocates for their respective sports. Part cheerleaders, part mascots, part hype men. Their primes aligned with their sports breaking through into massive popularity and mainstream cultural appeal not all that far behind the American professional leagues.

Their passion for their sports and their big, catchphrase-driven personalities were what their sports needed. They were more entertainer than analyst and that contributed to drawing massive audiences in. Again, they were what their sports needed. They weren’t alone — certainly there were a lot of influential voices in college football in particular, but Corso’s iconic headgear schtick was uniquely perfect for college football — but both of these men played a role in elevating the sports they loved. College football is known for marching bands and traditions and stuff, but I think that if you have to pull one image that best reflects the sport, it’s Corso pulling out that mascot gear from under the GameDay desk in front of a sea of fans, many of their bellies full of all sorts of inhibition-inhibiting fluids. You’d say the same about Vitale ranting and raving and inciting students in the ’90s.

Today, Corso’s and Vitale’s types still matter, but these sports are consumed more intellectually now and not quite as much viscerally, which is what’s so disconcerting about you consumers (all due respect) responding to so well to debate shows. We need more thought in sports media and less shouting.

Anyway, I can’t think of many broadcasters whose love for their sports ooze through microphones quite the same way. The broadcast product, I mean. The analytics and multi-media movements have introduced a bit of a deeper level of thought into sports, but this all had to start somewhere. Corso for college football and Vitale for college basketball contributed to their sports the way Bob Costas did for baseball, John Madden the NFL or Don Cherry for hockey when I was young.

The old guard should be celebrated the way Corso was this weekend and Vitale will be when his time comes and the new generation of voices will have big shoes to fill without having to do it the same way. There is sort of a figurative transition of eras involved here.