Express Word: A long look ahead

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss Purdue next season, basketball recruiting and more.

LONG WAY AWAY, BUT …

So, coming off an NCAA runner-up season, Purdue looks to keep rolling next season with a very different team. Unfortunately for the Boilermakers, early rankings and such have been favorable. Being “written off” post-Zach Edey probably would be a really positive thing for Braden Smith and Co., but it doesn’t appear as if that prodding is going to come from anyone credible or worth platforming.

Anyway, the season is months away. It’s not even summer yet.

But I need stuff to write and I’ve found that with my readers, there’s no such thing as “too early” for random basketball takes, so here goes.

• Possible Purdue takes a step back as a shooting team next season. Without Edey, Braden Smith may not have as many step-in threes. Without Edey, hell, that affects the quality of everyone’s looks. Fletcher Loyer may have to take/force more and more rarely jibes with efficiency. Purdue will run plays for Myles Colvin and Camden Heide, I’m betting, but again, more isn’t always the ally of percentages, even if the Year 2 bump goes their way. All six freshmen can shoot, but expecting freshmen to shoot well isn’t always a winning bet.

This is going to be a very different Purdue team. Different doesn’t always mean worse. It just means different. In 2019, Purdue was different as it’s ever been and should have made the Final Four.

• Hot button: Offensive rebounding has been a central piece to Purdue’s formula for years now. Edey and Mason Gillis shall be missed, however. Next year, Purdue’s new wing athleticism really needs to show up in ways that go way beyond running and dunking. Camden Heide and Myles Colvin are going to be needed on the glass.

• Trey Kaufman-Renn‘s passing and decision-making now come to the forefront the way Edey’s did before last season. It’s going to be critical once he establishes himself as the sort of scorer opponents will need to game plan. Keep in mind, too, that things change some in the fact that he’ll play facing the basket more than most of the post scorers Purdue’s had before him. This figures to be more Trevion Williams-ish than Zach Edey-ish.

• A bunch of these freshmen can help Purdue right away and some will be needed to, ready or not, but the lock of the bunch, to me, is Gicarri Harris, for a lot of reasons — need certainly being one — but none bigger than his intangibles. His competitiveness is top shelf, and you don’t star in Atlanta without being a tough, competitive individual. It’s different down there. There will be minimal size-and-athleticism learning curve for Harris.

PURDUE RECRUITING’S FLAT CIRCLE

Purdue just built a near-national champion with its guys.

Lost in that broader picture is the hidden advantage it’s built for itself that’s yielded so many of its guys.

Early commitments.

Now, early commitments are a dangerous, dangerous game, as Purdue witnessed up close many years back. But if you work well in advance and get those guys ID’d effectively and they see the mutual fit, you know what happens? They commit right away.

And when they commit right away, being ahead begets being ahead. Your advance work on future classes comes to the forefront and you stand a better chance to keep getting those early commitments and keep the wheel in the sky turning, when you know exactly who’ll be play-ing tomorrow. (Yep, I went full Journey. Deal with it.)

Right now, Purdue has one scholarship to fill for 2025, and all its cannons (not Kanons) pointed at one player: Trent Sisley. Figurative cannons, not literal cannons, though the latter would be one way to do it also, the Vito Corleone way.

Anyway, Purdue’s basically a class ahead again, which brings us to this point.

If Purdue were a portal shopper, the Final Four would give it a momentum bump. It’s not a portal shopper.

Will it help with Sisley? Can’t hurt. But Purdue had already made a pretty ironclad case there that it’s just up to him to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to. The Final Four was a big deal in that recruitment, but probably not a momentous one.

Now, 2026 … that’s the class.

These are the recruits most likely to be affected positively by Purdue breaking its glass ceiling. This is the class where Matt Painter and staff will hope roll-over advantages keep churning. The Summer of Sisley is also going to be heavily, heavily, heavily 2026-focused.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• I don’t cover Indiana, but I have always considered Indiana a Purdue-adjacent topic and thus newsworthy in my small piece of the editorial world.

So I’m going to say this just because I get paid by the word and am running out of words: What are you doing, IU?

It is well known that Indiana stakeholders are upping the NIL ante this spring in a blaze of spending glory in hopes of crushing the portal and saving Mike Woodson. Cool. Seems reasonable under most circumstances.

But take a step back and consider the big picture. You’ve already more or less had to acknowledge that a coaching change was strongly considered after this past season. My belief has always been that once you have to release public indications that you are not firing your coach, your coach is essentially fired, just blowing in the wind amidst swirling negativity, tribal fan warfare and inevitable doom. Hell, I’ve seen it with two Purdue football coaches and the end of the Gene Keady Era at Purdue and all that stuff was (mostly) before social media and this weird time when schools need their fans to ostensibly pay their players.

Now, back to IU. Mike Woodson is 66 years old, obviously involved only to a point in recruiting all these transfers. It’s a price-tag game, as we all we know. Not being ageist here, but you know the deal. You could crush the portal this year by outspending everyone, maybe take a big step forward as a team — when trending suggests this rent-a-team model isn’t easy — and then what? Woodson coaches ’til he’s 80 and does it every year from here on out? You gonna pony up the same money every year to do it? None of those outcomes are realistic. And when you’re starting over every year, just trying to be good, you’re not building toward something bigger. I think over time many of these Supermarket Sweep recruiting programs are going to realize that this is the difference between renting and owning your home.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to hold off on adding that extra million to the NIL war chest to help A) get and B) support the next guy? The next guy is coming soon, no matter what. He, whoever he ends up being, is who should matter most.

I know this is all coming from the highest levels of the university and long-standing relationships are at play here between Woodson and Quinn Buckner, but it just seems short-sighted to invest so much in such a short-term asset. Keeping IU just good enough to not bottom out totally actually helps its rivals in a roundabout way. Keep the state of unrest long as can be.

Beyond that, desperate teams with money to burn are an easy mark. Better not get your collective shaken down for a few more stacks at the last second. Remember, these guys all have agents and agents tend not to be dummies. I say this as a life-long Yankees fan who’s watched his team get baited into overpaying for so many players after the Red Sox or Mets or whoever showed interest in somebody.

If I’m the rest of the Big Ten, I start calling transfers I don’t want or can’t take just to get it out there on social media that Ohio State wants a kid Michigan has targeted or Purdue is “pushing hard” for this IU target or that Illinois target. Drive up the prices.

Anyway, just a thought, but, again, I’m paid by the word.

• Purdue’s won back-to-back titles and just went to the Final Four. It doesn’t matter, but it does come to mind how close Purdue has been to so much more. The banked-in three at Wisconsin three seasons ago may have cost the Boilermakers another league title. The Virginia mousetrap cost Purdue a Final Four. There’s a world where a few small things break differently and you’re sitting with four of the past six Big Ten titles and two Final Fours. That says nothing of the Andre Wesson three and Keita Bates-Diop tip-in, the Miles Bridges 30-footer, and finally the Isaac Haas injury, in 2017-18.

• I don’t want to ever want this all to get to a point where people are dunking on those transfers who fall through the cracks for one reason or another, but T.J. Sheffield leaving Purdue in-season only to never play for Michigan State, only to land at football wasteland UConn is a cautionary tale if I’ve ever seen one.

Take care of your business, fellas, because just because there’s a home for everybody nowadays in the portal era, it doesn’t mean it’s a great spot.

• The Jontay Porter news from the NBA is a cautionary tale as well for all sports, but college in particular, not that the state of Iowa and SEC baseball hadn’t already issued that warning.

It’s way too easy to gamble and gambling is way too normalized and way too embedded in the the sports mainstream now for this to not be a potential atom bomb for college sports, where young people aren’t always the most savvy, access to them is far too prevalent, the people around them not always particularly sophisticated and money more than ever now the games’ driving force.

I’ve watched many college basketball games over the years thinking one of the teams might be on the take. I wonder how many of them actually were, but also how many more now will be.