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.

According to Ken Pomeroy's number crunching/black magic, Purdue is currently No. 103 nationally in defensive efficiency. It hasn't stopped the Boilermakers from being 21-3 and one of the most outstanding teams in college basketball to this point, but nevertheless that's a big number.

Let's talk about it for a few minutes.

First allow me to preface this by saying that while Purdue is an elite offensive team, it is not a great defensive team, and expecting a wholesale transformation in mid-February would not be reasonable. The Boilermaker program is not what people still perceive it as, much more of an offensive-minded operation as it's been constructed. And the results of that shift can't be disputed.

That doesn't mean Matt Painter's no longer a defensive coach at heart, but his program nowadays has been built more like John Beilein Michigan than Gene Keady Purdue.

Nevertheless, Purdue can be better than its metrics suggest, and at the end of the day, this is all still hand-wringing over a team that's 21-3 and ranked third nationally. Don't lose sight of that when surveying the raw data for land mines.

But what's the deal here, you might ask? Purdue's defensive numbers were better — much better — last season when the Boilermakers were prohibitively young.