Express Word: Purdue vs. USC, Big Ten basketball and more

Gold and Black Express’ Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we discuss Purdue’s meeting with USC, basketball and more.

ON PURDUE VS. USC

I might be wrong and Purdue might get its doors blown off by USC and the presumably superior talent on its well-monied-since-long-before-NIL roster, but my gut thought is to be ready for anything Saturday afternoon.

First off, USC isn’t what people tend to assume it is based on reputation, the iconic helmet and the 1980s McDonald’s color scheme. A blueblood program, sure, but a 7-6 team last season whose coach is sitting in a frying pan. The Trojans have been competitively compromised by their move to the Big Ten and like many of their ilk have not necessarily benefited from a world where now everyone’s players are getting paid.

USC hasn’t shown it can travel and win outside In ‘N Out Country. It lost every game it played last season in the pre-Oregon Trails Big Ten footprint, to powerhouses Minnesota and Maryland and a very mediocre Michigan team. When it last played at Notre Dame the year before, it got blasted. These are different teams from year to year obviously, but the point is that it is hard winning football games traveling cross-country and it has been especially so for Lincoln Riley and the Trojans.

Ross-Ade Stadium, too, will be unwelcoming, as this game will be an event and a few years of frustration are ready to boil over in the crowd. Purdue’s turnouts for two nobody opponents were solid.

This is a golden opportunity for Purdue to announce its presence and this is still a point in the season when no one really knows anything, except for what members of this Boilermaker staff know about the inner workings of the USC team.

Anything’s possible.

THE BIG TEN BASKETBALL SCHEDULE

I have reason to believe the Big Ten men’s basketball schedule is complete, probably still under review by the too many hands that are stuck in the cookie jar, but nevertheless done. It has not been released.

I do not want to pretend to know exactly why, but considering TV is all that matters in any of this, I can only assume.

But I do want to make this point, brought to mind by the urgency media like myself who actually cover this conference’s games feel to get their trips booked: These announcements should be fast-tracked. You have let TV turn this conference into a monstrosity, after it was fans and in some smaller part media who positioned you to do so. People who want to or need to travel deserve runway to plan, and in case FOX and NBC and the Big Ten haven’t noticed, things aren’t getting cheaper.

Every day this schedule isn’t public is one more day all those West Lafayette-based fans I saw at Oregon and Washington last season can’t put in for time off at work, can’t book flights or hotels or whatever, and it’s more reason to know for damn certain that fans were the absolute last priority in any of this illogical expansion. You ought to be doing right by them. If that means announcing schedules in bits and pieces and forsaking those record-breaking ratings that come from a Tuesday afternoon BTN schedule-reveal special or the meaningless likes that might come from a Twitter graphic, heaven forbid.

I’m speaking here only about Purdue’s following, but you can be sure Indiana folks and those following certain other programs are in the same situation. Players’ families, too.

It’s also reason to believe that the nature of traditional Big Ten fandom is either being overlooked or outright ignored here. That’s unacceptable.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• Why in the world does Football World think it has to attach itself to influencers? FOX went with provocateur Dave Portnoy and has rolled him out with WWE-like character creation. Does TV think people are that dumb that just because someone with a billion followers on socials is on TV, they’ll want to watch football? Is he on there to talk football or talk s–t?

YouTube had an NFL game and had someone or something named Mr. Beast on the screen every 10 minutes. I don’t know why that guy is popular and probably wouldn’t understand if you explained it to me, but I doubt his demo is the NFL’s target audience. If YouTube needed to remind you constantly that this game was on YouTube, the YouTube logo in the middle of the screen at all times probably could have sufficed.

Unlike Portnoy and whatever Mr. Beast is, Pat McAfee at least played, affording him credibility in his space that he doesn’t use because his whole brand is attitude, which is apparently what networks want, because they have reason to believe it’s what people want.

The interesting part of the whole YouTube NFL broadcast was that they paired non-sensical Mr. Beast cut-ins with a studio team that was awesome — Derek Carr, Tyrann Mathieu and Brandon Marshall — and built around actual football talk. People should learn things about the sports they’re watching from the people on these shows, not placated by cultural opiate of the people, which is what so much of sports media is becoming.

Viewers should expect, and demand, better.

• Ohio State’s saber-rattling about revenue distribution in the Big Ten was inevitable. The only question there ever was was whether it would be Ohio State, Michigan or Penn State to be the one to bring the issue to the table. Winning a national title, I guess, put the onus on the Buckeyes.

This very issue is the basis for the long-held thought/fear that one day the top 20-25 programs/brands might just split off and do their own thing, cut their own media deal, create their own media platform, even. But it was only a matter of time before the “worth more, get more” topic came up and the big ones started shaking down the little ones.

Truthfully, they do have a point. Texas is worth more than Mississippi State to the SEC and Ohio State is worth way more to the Big Ten than Purdue. Reminder: these are football-only matters; if basketball or dare I say academics were considerations, it would be different.

But Texas and Ohio State are doing just fine as is, and their greed is obscuring the big picture that they all benefit from competing in strong leagues. You already have every advantage imaginable over your peers, so if you aren’t getting $60-million a year in distribution instead of $50 million, then boo freaking hoo. You’ll just have to keep falling back on your billion donors, massive alumni bases and profoundly monetizeable brands.

People — TV included, and that deal is up in 2030 — want to see good games. They want to see Hulk Hogan vs. Roddy Piper, not Iron Mike Sharpe. TV wants good games. People watch good games, and TV wants whatever people watch.

It’s short-sighted as hell.

Crippling your conference because you want more than the everything you already have is peak Big Football entitlement and greed, and it’s television that should put its foot down. Yes, the Big Ten is a transcontinental abomination now because people (I guess) need to see Michigan play Oregon, but those same people watch Michigan-Wisconsin too, and they might not if Wisconsin falls off the map.

Parity is a punchline to Big Football, but this media-share arrangement is at least superficial parity.

Nice long con they ran here: Spend like crazy, up the price of everything from facilities to coaches and now players, then try to rig the game so no one else can credibly play.

• Projected one-and-done Cameron Williams visits Purdue this weekend, an interesting test of Matt Painter’s approach to these modern times and the thin air he’s currently recruiting in. Paying a freshman more than veterans and making playing time assurances on the front end are antithetical to his traditional approach, but with this level of player, the game is the game.