Express Word: June getting busier and busier, NCAA change suggestions, Purdue recruiting and more

Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In this issue’s edition, we discuss the complexities of college sports these days and more.

ON JUNE’S NEW RELEVANCE

June has really become an epicenter month for college football and college basketball alike and you wonder if some stuff’s going to have to change with the NCAA calendars to break this stuff.

In football recruiting, June is the new December when it comes to recruiting visits. High school recruiting still really matters, so between these relatively new summer official visits and long-standing camp seasons.

Basketball recruiting now has these June evaluation periods and camp season, plus the same summer official visit obligations as football, though the numbers involved aren’t even remotely the same.

Oh, and June is when teams return to campus and start school and off-season training. Don’t forget what coaches’ first priority has to be.

Basketball can at least kind of kick back in August. Football certainly can’t.

I’ve said this for years …

As little sympathy as I have for men who get paid like kings to do these jobs, they are human beings, too, and they have families and people who work for them who need work-life balance.

We have to protect coaches, and you do that with the calendar. In football, these two portal windows, plus June, plus the run-up to the season, it’s all just so much. Solutions are slippery, because the pressure to win makes them so.

There’s no real easy answer here.

But there are too many balls in the air here.

ON THE OLDER NCAA

Under no circumstances does anyone involved with the NCAA want college athletes considered professionals, but they also have to make sure that at this very moment in time that there can’t be professional college athletes.

It’s all nuance right now considering a lot of college athletes make more money now than they ever will again, college basketball players and college football players all over are paid better than they would be if they were in the the NBA or NFL (on low-end contracts) and these roles these hand-picked athletes play for schools are inarguably jobs. There is every incentive right now for many, many college athletes to try to make those jobs into careers.

But as the dust settles post House Settlement, someone eventually is going to really credibly attack eligibility limits on restriction-of-trade grounds. Zakai Zeigler at Tennessee fought and — thus far — has lost, but he’s just the first dive-bomber headed toward the battleship. Nothing stops you or I from going back to school to hoard degrees, but there should be barriers beyond the toll aging takes from playing sports into perpetuity. College sports.

Something to consider and vet whether it might hold up in court: Age limits.

You’d have to be generous about it — your 26th birthday maybe — and build in exemptions for military service, faith-based missions (I guess), Olympic training in certain sports, but it would make sense to anyone who wants to protect the spirit of college sports. The implications of “amateurism” may be, well, illegal but the spirit of it — sports being played by young people — should be upheld. Of course, one man’s protection of the spirit of college sports is another man’s violation of the Sherman Act.

Maybe this is just personal preference on my part, but college basketball is better than G-League basketball and college football is better than whatever its semi-pro equivalent would be if there is one.

Some say college sports are better with older players.

Are they? To me, they’re less interesting.

The Europe thing in college basketball is going to make for a better product, but when those guys are all 23 years old, you are just subbing international professional basketball in for American amateur basketball.

There’s no equivalent in football, but what happens when some rich-kid fifth-year senior quarterback doesn’t get drafted then hires an attorney to try to keep playing college football?

If you think such things will never happen, well, you’d have said the same 10 years ago, and since then, everything has happened.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• I just want to say this real: Marketable players, get real agents.

You saw what happened in April to Shadeur Sanders after he bet it all on his dad’s NFL connections, and now Rutgers’ Ace Bailey seems to be getting bad advice from the same agent who foolishly pushed him to Piscataway because he’s buddies with one of their coaches. Bailey, who didn’t show much this season to suggest he can be a winning NBA player, has reportedly been turning down pre-draft workouts with certain teams because he expects to get drafted top-three. What could possibly go wrong? I get that players are different now and the dynamics around them are very different, but anyone who might want to hire you and pay you millions should get A) respect and B) a credible effort. Any decent agent with either experience or wisdom should be pushing that message.

Just like Nico Iamaleava back in the spring. He listened to unserious people, overplayed his hand and wound up leaving Tennessee to get paid less to play at barely relevant UCLA.

I know there’s a certain sentiment among college sports followers about the athletes having agents. I know it might sound nefarious, and sometimes it’s going to be.

But in this climate they are absolutely necessary.

• Daniel Jacobsen is going to make that USA Basketball team and profoundly benefit from the chance to play himself into shape against this level of competition. Every year, Purdue seems to have a breakout guy. This is your safest bet, it would appear.

Never has a Boilermaker player done an international tour like this and not come back much improved.

• Rankings don’t really matter, particularly for Purdue, but I think when all is said and done you’re going to see Purdue have a really good chance to sign a bunch of very well-regarded 2026 basketball recruits.

• Just want to highlight here the significance for this site of our hiring of new staffer Dub Jellison.

Dub will basically be a full-time recruiting reporter, a role we’ve probably needed for years now. The job has gotten so big and changed so much and the demands of team coverage have gotten so broad that now more than ever, it is a full-time job. We look forward to our recruiting coverage becoming more in-depth, more thorough, more on-site-driven and just more. We look forward to having the time and manpower to tell you more about who these players are when it just seems like it’s raining context-free names at times. That’s our goal.