Today, GoldandBlack.com continues a new weekly feature. We're calling it the Weekly Word.

Why? Because it has words, it's posted weekly and we're just that unimaginative. (Actual feedback from Week 1: Definitely like the content, but a new name would be useful.)

Anyway, here are some random thoughts for the week, most of which will be Purdue-related.

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Northwestern football is in a good place right now, faring very well by its historical standards in recruiting while the paint dries on a new facility that could be every bit as transformative as the one that loomed large in taking Purdue's program from one level to another in a very short period of time.

The Wildcats, in football at least, are no longer to the Big Ten what Vanderbilt is to the SEC, the nerdy kid in a bad teen movie who's only purpose is to get stuffed in lockers by the cool kids, or in this case, have its stadium over-run by the fans of even its most middle-of-the-pack visitors. Northwestern is on rock-solid ground, set up for bigger things to come, and as I've written here before, maybe in line to become a sort of Stanford of the Midwest in the college football world.

I don't cover Northwestern, obviously, but am using it solely to draw a parallel here with Purdue, because I think Pat Fitzgerald's longevity at his alma mater and the certainty his place there means for that program's future is a key piece to Northwestern's steady todays and promising tomorrows. A winner of 58 percent of his games during a tenure that now stands as the second longest of any sitting Big Ten football coach, Fitzgerald has coached 14 seasons at Northwestern and being only 44 years old, there's not much reason to think he wouldn't coach there another 20, and that stuff matters.

Northwestern is recruiting as well as it ever has — and maybe even as well as it can — right now in part because of that stability, that knowledge recruits have that the guy recruiting them isn't going anywhere. That stuff may matter now as much as ever, because the coaching business is more fluid than ever. Certainty is a hard thing to come by in recruiting, and when you can offer it, you sell it and sell it hard, and I'd imagine that's what Northwestern is doing.

Different sport, obviously, but right now, Purdue basketball enters this July in as solid a spot with its next two recruiting classes as I've maybe seen in far too many years doing this, the only problem being a scarcity of scholarships.

The Boilermakers didn't go to the Final Four this year, but I think you've probably never been given stronger reason to believe that their day will one day come than you were this year. Purdue just sucker-punched the Big Ten and, in a good way, its fans by winning an improbable conference title and reaching the Elite Eight for the first time since the turn of the century, not only building on sustained success from the four years prior, but taking it to another level, a positive sign for the future, both short- and long-term.