Express Word: Big Ten officiating, experience's value and more
The Weekly Word is our weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In this week’s edition, written before Thursday’s loss at Maryland, we discuss Purdue basketball’s roster development, this strange Big Ten season and much more.
AN UNWELCOME SHIFT
So let’s talk about the most unwelcome shift Purdue has seen since the Big Ten season hit The Turn, after the Boilermakers looked poised to win the regular season title going away, which they still may.
After November, December and January were accompanied by almost a pleasant surprise that Zach Edey and his team — well, Edey — were being officiated properly, things seem to be trending back toward 2015 Isaac Haas conditions, the loss at Northwestern being the most egregious such example in some time. I’d imagine the number of blown calls, many of which are immortalized in screencap form online, numbered in the dozens.
You can’t face guard rebounders, you can’t lock arms against rebounders, and no screen in which the ball is dribbled before the screener’s feet have stopped moving can be legal.
Zach Edey is a massive advantage for Purdue. It is not officials’ job to create parity by dulling advantages. That is what happened in Evanston and a few other times lately, and while I’d ordinarily attribute this stuff in part to Edey’s uniqueness and officials working way too many games and not being either prepared or well-enough rested, all these guys have seen Edey before. There are no surprises here and it is these men’s responsibility to call games correctly but also protect the players before someone cracks an elbow. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.
Purdue’s dominant offensive rebounding has not been lately what it once was. The Boilermakers average north of 12 offensive rebounds per game and roughly a dozen second-chance points. At Northwestern, it was nine and two, respectively. Hey, I wonder what that’s all about.
You saw the arm-locking Northwestern resorted to. Forget the refs. Shame on Chris Collins for not putting a stop to it real time. It’s dangerous. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that his staff did not encourage this.
That was strange TV this weekend, the conference’s media arm seemingly cheering on the upset from well before tip-off. It just so happens that Northwestern winning made for a court-storming and the compelling broadcast content that comes with it and made the conference race more compelling than it would have been had Purdue won. The cringiest moment of BTN’s season came via Andy Katz’s pre-game WWE promo cheering on the court storming before the game had even started. Forget the complete dismissal of any guise of objectivity there and remember how dangerous court stormings are, an issue no one seems to be doing anything meaningful about. Wait ’til someone gets sued. How hard is it to implement real consequences to any school that allows court stormings to happen before the visiting team has left the floor?
Look, I’m not making excuses here for Purdue, which has to stop turning the ball over, for one thing, and was due for some it’s-a-long-season struggles. But just because a team is way up in the standings or on the scoreboard, that’s not license for everybody else to do whatever the hell they want. Just because no one can stop Zach Edey that doesn’t mean they get help. It used to be where great players got benefit of the doubt, but ever since people started making an issue of Edey being called for very few fouls, the worm seems to have turned. When Hunter Dickinson picked up his first foul in Ann Arbor, the call against Edey that followed was as egregious a keep-it-even call as could be imagined.
But there should be no doubt to anyone watching the games that the last few weeks have not been called the same as the first few months, the start of it being that window where Tom Izzo and to a lesser extent Kevin Willard lobbied publicly because their players aren’t good enough to guard Edey and in Izzo’s case, he chooses to mostly go one-on-one in the post.
That’s the nature of advantages, folks, and it’s not for officials to decide who gets to have them and who doesn’t.
EXPERIENCE MATTERS
Purdue has belied a lot of conventional thinking when it comes to experience as it relies so much on two true freshman guards, but at the same time, it’s a third-year upperclassman that has driven all this.
The rest of the Big Ten has shown us the perils of roster management in the Pickup Team Era.
Indiana returned all its key pieces from last season and has been the second-best team in the league because of it, even with a couple freshmen playing key roles. Northwestern has its senior backcourt back and is getting the payout for all their late-game meltdowns before this season. They’re winning close games now.
Meanwhile, Ohio State is loaded with freshmen and transfers and new staffers and their season has been a disaster, even with incompetent officiating handing them a win over Rutgers in December. Illinois, the Big Ten’s pre-eminent SEC program, has gotten what it’s paid for from a consistency perspective.
As much as college basketball is changing, some things stay the same, and the importance of experience and continuity are still going to matter, which should be heartening to Purdue partisans as this group likely stays together for a while.
RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK
• Purdue football is going with a pretty modern and pro-like organizational structure and that’s great, but here’s hoping for Ryan Walters’ sake that this sort of thing doesn’t fall prey to the same trappings that too often made things unnecessarily complicated and unpleasant during the Brohm Era. First off, these “management” positions must be filled by competent people. Second, communication and cooperation have to pluses. Third, any staff member in a role that justifies their voice be heard should have a platform and be empowered.
It’s not rocket science.
