Express Thoughts: College basketball drama, Purdue football and more

Gold and Black Express’ analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind.

ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL’S NEW SILLY SEASON

Let me say something about what’s going on in college basketball right now: This is stupid.

It is just stupid that all of these teams are resetting every single season — bad for the coaches, bad for the players, bad for the sport. Everybody benefits from a strong and stable college basketball, but that is not the way this is trending, and I say that as a staunch proponent of players getting what they have always been owed.

But the over-correction in all this represents an existential crisis for the sport and for the actual lives that can be affected.

Players are committing to numbers — not coaches, not colleges, not the great programs — numbers. Coaches are taking players and spending a lot of money to get them who might not be any better than guys who have been through their program before and left.

What would Illinois fans think right now if they had an opportunity to sign the Mountain West Conference’s leading scorer? That player would be Dravyn Gibbs-Lawhorn, the one-time Purdue commitment who just averaged 21 points a game for UNLV a year after he was sitting at the end of Illinois’ bench.

How many Purdue fans right now are talking themselves into the thought of Cam Heide or Myles Colvin’s athleticism being back on the roster, even though that athleticism really wasn’t put into practical, winning use while those two players were Boilermakers.

The logic in this whole marketplace is completely screwed.

This is a classic American market-dynamics story, but the difference in the economy of college basketball vs. any other market is that you are applying all the inexact science of recruiting to a higher-stakes, profoundly expensive and fundamentally half-assed process.

College basketball players are not commodities, but they are being treated as such and so we will talk about them as such. You are not trading in known commodity here, but operating as if you are.

When you trade barrels of oil as I often do in my spare time, you know what you’re getting: literally a barrel full of oil.

When you buy a PSA 8-graded Michael Jordan rookie card, you know what you’re getting: a 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan basketball card that has been deemed subjectively and in secrecy by a possibly criminal enterprise as being a certain level of quality.

When you buy a college basketball player, who the hell knows? Some hit big, sure, but go look at the billion players in the portal right now and see how many names you remember from last year. It’s not always the player’s decision to leave. Buyer’s remorse is a two-way street.

When you trade in 20-year-old college basketball players like they’re barrels of oil, you are doing so on deadline, with no foundation in relationship or knowledge of a skill set, surrounding voices, agenda, etc., you get what you get.

“Foundation” is the operative term in all this. It’s elusive for both sides of this ridiculous song and dance. coaches don’t know what they’re getting; players don’t know what they’re getting into.

It’s a powder keg for everybody.

Now, give Michigan a ton of credit. It had an outside-the-box basketball vision in mind when it went out and assembled the roster it assembled. Now, the manner in which it was assembled deserves scrutiny, but the basketball piece of it was brilliance. Can any team do that sort of thing every year?

As for the players: Fellas …

Watching a lot of this from afar is tough, man, because you just know there are really bad decisions being made all over the place.

Putting familiar faces on it …

Last year, during the drunken-sailor era of NIL spending, Heide left a stable, comfortable situation at Purdue for a predictably horrible fit playing for Sean Miller at Texas and it ended with Heide back in the portal and Miller losing no sleep over it; Colvin left for more shots at Wake Forest, got them, then left again, this time for Cincinnati. Why? Unless you’re running away from something, you’ve got to be working toward something, whether it’s winning, a degree or professional opportunities, which constant movement can’t possibly help.

There are players everywhere jumping around like Frogger, making lateral moves, by their choice or otherwise, and not really going anywhere. When all is said and done, hopefully most of them hold degrees from somewhere and took care of their money well enough to have not squandered the immense advantages available to them. Hopefully after anywhere between four and seven years playing college basketball, they have friends and advocates and people who will stand up for them when they are needed. That’s foundation.

In the real world, I don’t know anyone who attended more than one four-year college. Can you even do that? It’s chaos.

Purdue is once again in a really fortuitous position in that it landed its man midseason when it got Caden Pierce, thus more or less removing it from this chaos. It’s still in the game for a big man, but it’s not playing the game. And since it was able to recruit Pierce over a matter of time and not have to engage in one of these shotgun weddings, Purdue actually has a little bit of a relationship with the kid.

But absurdity affects everyone before long, and right now everything is absurd. Absurd for coaches, absurd for players, absurd for media (which have been just as stupid as any other part of this) and absurd for fans.

OH AND …

So this weekend, college sports’ gold standard for fiscal responsibility, the University of Louisville, nabbed commitments from Flory Bidunga and Jackson Shelstad.

In a twist so hilarious I can’t even make it up, this comes on the heels of the school’s president, athletic director, and board of trustees chairman making a statement about how college athletics is unsustainable in its current financial climate. I assume that this statement was not made ironically.

Louisville spent a ton of money to get those two guys on top of all the money it is spent on the rest of its roster. And Louisville is not done buying players for next year’s team. Programs like that when desperate to win will do whatever they have to do and that’s what people all across the country are doing. (Also, you’ve got a really good friend when you have adidas.)

The national media has failed you by not differentiating between NIL and revenue sharing. Everything is still being gathered under the umbrella of “budget,” “war chest,” and just the nebulous “NIL.”
When a school announces it is retaining a troubled coach, it is in effect telling on itself when it promises that that coach will have more revenue at his or her disposal, assuming the football coach didn’t personally sign off on some of his revenue sharing funding being redirected to help a middling basketball team. The football coach didn’t do that, by the way.

And if the same media is to be believed, some of these players are commanding and presumably getting $5 million to transfer to some of these schools. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but chances are it’s not far off. Everyone has reason to either inflate or suppress the market by throwing crap out there into the public sphere, so keep that in mind.

So let’s kind of lay it all out there: as you know if you read this site, schools are allowed just under $21 million to share with/pay their athletes in any way, shape or form they see fit. “NIL” can be earned on top of that, but must go through a review process that no school can credibly make promises about pre-review.

So if someone is paying one basketball player $5 million, that is roughly a quarter of their revenue sharing budget for their entire athletic department men’s basketball women’s basketball football Olympic sports all of it.

I’m not stupid: This process was always going to be rife with flaws and certain to be flouted by more schools than not.

But in the meantime, we can also call it what it is: Cheating.

The thing about cheating, though, is you’re supposed to pretend like you’re not.

No one is pretending anything. They are just doing it like they were last off-season when unlimited NIL payments were street legal because the NCAA couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

People are laughing at the House Settlement and the CSC that came from it. So what now?

Louisville is gonna keep whining about unsustainability while acting in an unsustainable manner.

ON PURDUE FOOTBALL

At this point, it probably is time to move on from pointing out all the game-changing mistakes Ryan Browne made last season as Purdue’s quarterback. It’s not fair to keep relegating that stuff over and over and over again, and it also has to be kept in mind that he was essentially a freshman starter in the Big Ten. Players do get better, and they get better with experience, most importantly. Browne ought to.

His words this weekend about understanding the need to eliminate some of those critical errors obviously indicates that he understands where he is and what Purdue needs from him, but it also doesn’t change the fact that Barry Odom’s tenure at Purdue from here on out is tethered in large part to this off-season’s decision to stay with Browne as the program’s de facto building block as it moves forward.

Personally, having just watched last season and not been knee-deep in covering this stuff, I do think Ryan Browne can be a winning player with the right system, the right coaching, and the right level of talent around him. This is not all on him. But the results are on this coaching staff, as it looks to bring Purdue’s program back to a place where it shows a pulse in the Big Ten.