Weekly Word: Purdue vs. IU, Drew Brees and more

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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Compare and Contrast: Following his team's decisive 15-point win over Indiana on Saturday afternoon, Purdue's eighth win in nine tries against its arch-rival, Matt Painter got to talking about the differences between his program and the one it's dominated the past several years.

It wasn't a surprising topic that came up, not in this state, one where making sense of Indiana's problems when it has problems is always just as big a story as Purdue's success, if not bigger.

These are the situations where Painter has a way of winning the press conference, as they say. As a communicator, he's very good when given these platforms to discuss a bigger picture than his team's ball-screen defense or turnover numbers.

You'll recall his spiel after the Notre Dame loss, an even-keeled assessment of his team's struggles that boiled down to him politely suggesting his players get over themselves.

Since, Purdue is 6-1, playing its best basketball, thanks in part to, per Painter last week, his team's young players perhaps having gotten over themselves.

"I think our concentration is improved," Painter said last week. "I think that going into games, we have more people concentrating on what they need to do to help us win, especially our bench. The freshmen on our team have really made strides. It's really hard to play those roles — to play 10-20, 10-15 minutes — and then come in, and sometimes your value has nothing to do with scoring the basketball. It's great if you do, but if you don't, you can still bring value to the team, and I think all those guys are bringing value to the team."

I digress.

Anyway, Painter was asked about the differences between Purdue and Indiana. It should be noted that there's no greater excuse-maker, no greater surrogate, no more empathetic voice for the coach and team he just beat than Painter. That's his deal. He's too respectful to other coaches to not explain off their failures before his own successes. It's what can make him such a wet blanket of a quote sometimes after wins, until someone raises a topic such as the one at hand here.

The difference between Purdue and Indiana right now.

Painter said, basically, it's because IU has been unable to stay "old," as is so important in college basketball especially nowadays. And that may be true, but the Purdue team that just handled is not old.

Yes, it starts three upperclassmen, including two seniors, but it also played five guys who didn't set foot on the floor in a Purdue uniform last season, and got 93 minutes of playing time from starters who weren't regular first-stringers at any point in their careers prior to this past November. Maybe that's not young as much as new, but my point stands.

Purdue is young, but more so, Purdue is new, so the point Painter was making about IU was undercut by his own team's success of late, as his Boilermakers and Archie Miller's Hoosiers head in opposite directions at the point in the calendar in which young teams are supposed to be playing better.

Indiana is hurt, and Indiana got in foul trouble when it couldn't afford foul trouble. Those things matter, and they contributed to a one-sided outcome, for certain. Don't lose sight of that here when spiking the football over a singular Purdue win.

But this wasn't just a singular Purdue win. It was the continuation of a one-sided run in which the Hoosiers have won just once since the ball dropped on 2014, and had to hang for dear life to win that one.

That's where the question is applicable. Why?

Yes, rivalries can be cyclical. Indiana dominated Purdue when Purdue stunk in the front half of the 2000s; Purdue dominated Indiana when Indiana stunk post-Kelvin Sampson Meltdown.

But these past nine games, they've been played on a more even playing field. Miller didn't inherit Kentucky's 2012 roster from Tom Crean, but he didn't inherit what Crean inherited from Sampson, either. He still has two first-team All-Big Ten sorts of players.

And that doesn't change the fact, either, that Miller has already transformed his roster with one guy: The prodigious talent that is Romeo Langford.

In the low point of his NBA internship to this point, Langford was basically shut out by Nojel Eastern, a brilliantly talented scorer and future multi-millionaire outworked and out-toughed (to steal one of clichétown's best non-words) by a big-hearted Chicago kid who's happy to play his hindquarters off and affect games without ever scoring a point. That he did score only made Eastern a bigger story.

Often, Langford stood around, waiting for the ball to come to him.

Meanwhile, Purdue's prodigious talent, Carsen Edwards, tearing through screens in the halfcourt like he was being chased by something terrible. Edwards' very first bucket of the game, seconds in, he must have sprinted a good 25 yards, all told.

Langford waited for the ball; Edwards went and got it.

Painter talked about recruiting, where these two programs are inherently different and always will be.

Indiana's the shoe-company darling with the gigantic, involved fan base, fun campus and name-brand banner in the state, the school that historically has gotten who it wants in Indiana, with cache enough nationally to get most whatever it needs nationally, too.

Purdue recruits a lot of blue-chip players and gets a few now and again, but otherwise builds teams more than it aggregates talent, and there's a big difference between the two. It lives off the "four-year guy," which perhaps one day folks will stop reading as a slight.

Purdue fans gripe about recruiting a lot. Maybe that's in part our fault for covering it so damn much. What's sometimes lost in the moment, however, is more the importance of continuity, development and a team playing for something bigger than itself than it is the hoarding of physical skill. After all, there's only one basketball.

That being said, skill matters. That's why Painter has loaded up on shooters.

On Saturday, one team could shoot, one couldn't, and as it turned out, the team with more talent had less skill.

Purdue's M.O. is team-building over talent aggregation.

Sure, the Boilermakers lost a guy to the NBA early a couple seasons ago. But it then had an even better season a year later because of the experience that came back.

And it may lose a guy to the NBA early again.

But Indiana has been a revolving door, and it'll continue next year after Langford leaves alongside Juwan Morgan. Then what? Then a bunch of freshmen come in, and they'll be good, but they may struggle against older teams.

One of those older teams will be Purdue, which is improving real-time and trending toward the NCAA Tournament, maybe even a say in the Big Ten race, in this transitional year, hoping this to be the beginning of another highly successful multi-year cycle.

It's getting better because it's learning to play together, to play for one another and because it's become tough. Toughness matters. Give Archie Miller some credit. He seems to be emphasizing the right things, but when you're trying to be the League's green room, and you're getting players in part because your fans showed the most "love," do those things jibe with substance?

Meanwhile, Purdue, organically, is becoming a standard-fare sort of Purdue team, the very sort of team that's had so much success against its more talented and scrutinized rival over about half a decade.

And that should answer the question of the differences between the two more than any post-game spiel can.

King of Pain: Drew Brees has his records, one of the most impressive bodies of work of any quarterback ever. He has his Super Bowl, and he could come back next season and double the single-season record for interceptions and it wouldn't do a thing to keep him out of the Hall of Fame.

He's one of the all-time greats, in more ways than one.

But in the twilight of his remarkable career, he's been bludgeoned by bad beats.

As you know, Brees and his New Orleans Saints should be preparing for the Super Bowl, getting ready to face the most likeable team in the NFL and the pluckiest of underdog stories, the New England Patriots.

They're not, because they got (choose the verb of your choosing and the tense of your choosing).

Yes, the Saints got jobbed by a blown call by NFL officials, a year after getting beat by the Vikings in arguably the greatest facepalm moment in league history.

Sunday was bad, though.

The PI call was clear, clear as they come. It would be beating on a long-expired horse to continue to harp on the absurdity of the botched call. Hell, you saw it.

It cost the Saints a first down inside the killzone, a chance to either run the score up out of reach or drain the clock altogether, or both.

It cost Brees a return to the Super Bowl, a year meeting a fate just as absurd.

Look, the NFL didn't rig the game. Just stop it with that stuff.

If the NFL was into fixing its own outcomes, I'm pretty sure the league's all-time leading passer and arguably its most marketable player probably wouldn't have gotten the short end of that stick.

But it is brutal for Brees, because the great ones care about winning, and it's his desire to win that's made him great.

And this is lasting-legacy time for him.

If he never gets his chance to go back to the Super Bowl now that two golden opportunities have gone by the wayside thanks to all sorts of silly, that would be a terribly unfortunate way for a historic, remarkable career to end.

Yes, Brees does deserve better.

But while his career to this point has played out like a movie, no one is guaranteed a happy ending.

I hate you, winter: Look, I'm out of stuff to write about for this week, so just bear with me on this irrelevance.

But anyway, last week I took the unprecedented step of offering a colleague the bags of water softener salt that I keep in my car during basketball season, which required me to tell someone out loud that I keep bags of water softener salt in my car, shining a light on my paranoia over driving in garbage weather.

It was Dec. 20, 2008, that Purdue beat Steph Curry and Davidson at the Wooden Tradition in what was then called Conseco Fieldhouse. It was a 2 p.m. game. I had my work done — there was less of it in those days – promptly after even though I knew the weather might be bad that night, I decided to redirect to Franklin Central south of Indianapolis to see Purdue recruit Patrick Bade play that night.

After the game, I drove back through Southport, stopped and grabbed a Sprite (no caffeine) and went on my way.

Then, stuff got bad, worse than I thought.

As I got through Lebanon, believing my speed to be more than reasonable given the conditions, I spun out for no particular reason going over a bridge, won the figurative lottery by not getting T-boned by any one of the vehicles around me, and promptly flew off the interstate toward a patch of farmland just before the I-65 northbound rest area.

I should have flipped.

I didn't, because the tires of my boss' car dug deep into ground just frozen enough to hold, just enough to keep me suspended at a harrowing 45-degree angle.

Another man was very nice to pull over and tell me what a lucky mother------ I was, and I thought three things.

1. Was that sort of language really necessary? My sensibilities are very delicate.

2. My Sprite didn't budge. What a beast of a cupholder.

3. If I open this door, I'm gonna both fall into, and buy, the farm.

Obviously things worked out for me. I did not expire on that evening. But a little piece of me did die that night, the piece of me capable of functioning as a motorist in bad weather.

It's the reason I spent an extra day in Madison a while back, then drove through crap weather anyway to get to Rockford to spend the night there. Murphy's law, you know.

It's the reason I'm the annoying hag chiding other writers to just "spend the night" instead of driving back to wherever they came from after games if the weather's bad.

Something I remind myself of sometimes when it comes to assessing risk, and maybe everyone should: It's just not worth it.

I'm scarred for life by Mother Nature, that soul-less monster. I want my nerve back.

It's tough this time of year, though, and as great as it is to get to cover Big Ten basketball for a living, there are times it sure would be nice if the Big Ten moved to Mississippi.

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