The Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com's weekly, obviously, column covering Purdue football, basketball and recruiting, as well as college sports issues, the true meaning of life, or whatever other topics might come to mind in a given week.
ON BIG MEN
What you saw from Zach Edey last night — a freshman carrying Purdue during crunch time of a relatively high-stakes March Big Ten game — was further reason to believe that the Boilermakers' Next Great Big Man is on the current roster, that title always seemingly occupied.
It's pretty remarkable how one way or another for years now, it's just been one after another, as if these trees grow on, well, trees.
Carl Landry and JaJuan Johnson were excellent, but since A.J. Hammons got really good around 2014, it's gone from Hammons to Caleb Swanigan to Isaac Haas to Matt Haarms (yes, I'm including him) to Trevion Williams, with the torch seemingly being passed toward Edey and maybe on to Caleb Furst after that.
Why's Purdue had so much success here? Because it's invested in doing so. It's not just recruiting these guys as finished products and plugging and playing. It's committing itself to playing in a way that will be inclusive to its big men and flat-out feature them when they're good enough, which all these dudes have been. In some ways Purdue has zigged when basketball has zagged.
