While Matt Painter and Purdue looks ahead to Houston on Friday night, college basketball's underworld continues to work overtime as the NCAA college basketball portal on Monday. Officially, Purdue's locker room and players are ignoring the portal while games remain.

But like a horror movie monster, it continues to chase behind a season that has Purdue in the Sweet 16 for the sixth time in the last eight seasons. Purdue is the only team with a starting lineup and bench full of players from its original school left in the NCAA Tournament.

But Painter has been open that that won't be the case next season, at least somewhere on his roster. Painter expects to lose at least a piece or two and will look to the portal to replace them with Purdue bringing in just one freshman next season, Antione West Jr..

Painter was asked, not about the portal directly, but about the fact this Sweet 16 features only high major programs for the first time since 1985. Matt Painter's answer was a long one, but an important framing of how college basketball has changed with the new transfer rules, how the portal has affected the game, and how it might continue to affect the game and, more importantly, the players going forward.

It was such a well thought out answer that it's worth reading in full, which has been provided in full below:

"We sit on a lot of committees, and I've put a lot of time into it. That was the one thing, when the portal kept going and they were allowing guys to -- it started with the one-time transfer, right? And now you can transfer whenever you want.

And we really talked about that, why do we want to go against -- everyone's a high school recruit at one point. It's now taking away from the high school recruit and his opportunities. We didn't want that.

Then March Madness, and we've been on the wrong end of this a couple of times. The upsets and how valuable the upsets are to the common fan. It's created March Madness. Let's not get away from it. It's a big piece of March Madness.

So then we're, like, I grew up on Ball State's campus. But I grew up wanting to go to Indiana. So when kids grow up, they want to go to the elite schools. They want to go to the Power Five schools. Now those other schools are really good basketball schools. But they also have to be able to grow their product.

Now, if we're not going to grow our product as much and we're going to have a different team every single year -- Purdue is still going to have players. I don't care who the coach is and what the situation is. You sell out every single one of your games. Our fans are unbelievable. We have the most Big Ten championships. We've had success for a long, long time.

You're always going to have players. But now these guys are just getting cherry picked from the D-IIs and the low majors and the mid-majors and cherry picked from high major to high major.

Now when you look at that, one of the things we talked about in those committees, is this going to take away from the value of a low-to-mid-major program. Because if it's not fair to anybody, it's not fair to them. That's not fair to them. They get a good player. They develop a good player. They lose a good player. Right?

That piece of it, we talked about taking away from high school recruiting, which it has, and we've talked about taking away from the low-to-mid-major programs. Now, time's going to tell, like, how true that is, right? Obviously it looks like it's trending that way, but we'll see through data.

And the other thing we talked about was, what you want in life is opportunity more than anything. And 99 percent of all college basketball players are not pros. Like digest that and understand that.

These opportunities for these young men and women to take is not just like getting an all-conference plaque on the wall. It's allowing them a better opportunity to have a successful life and have their family.

Not for everybody. Some people are going to be successful. Their dad went to college. Their grandfather went to college. Their great-grandfather went to college. You could go on and on and on.

Some people come from a single-parent home, some didn't go to college, whatever. If we're just chasing basketball and we're devaluing education, what are we really doing here, right?

From a basketball standpoint, I think there's some things that you've got to look at and there's also some things from an educational standpoint. And to make sure we're doing everything in our power to help them out because a lot gets talked about, okay, these guys haven't been paid in the past. But education has also put us in some great positions there.

I understand that. I don't think there's any coaches that want to get away from that. But I don't like when you have 200, 300, 400, 500 kids put their name in the portal and they had a scholarship and now they don't. What about them?

You're saying that kid should be able to do what he wants. People that are successful don't always do what they want; they do what's best for them. And we get away from that. But that's what we're here for. We're here to help them and fight them but also be an advocate for them in that fight.

That piece of it has got to get fixed. Now, if some kid was only going to get an education because he was good in basketball, that's a good thing. Now he has a better chance to be successful in life.

Now, if he just jumps schools and he thinks I'm going to go into the portal and get money and get a better situation, and now he doesn't get a scholarship when he had one, and now he never gets a degree -- which we all know a lot of people out there have been very, very successful without a degree -- but we all know it helps from a percentage standpoint. There's no doubt that it helps young people.

So I think those are the type of things that we've got to make sure we keep in perspective, not just, hey, this kid should be able to go where he wants. Coaches leave their schools and go other places and do that.

I understand that. That's a valid argument. It's a very valid argument. But there's a big cohort of young people in there with a lot of different examples in there, and it's always been our responsibility to try to set the framework of that so everybody has the best chance to be successful. And that has much -- not a lot to do with basketball, but basketball really being a vehicle for life." - Matt Painter