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.
THIS CAN BE REALLY GOOD, TOO
There are many, many perfectly legitimate and honestly disconcerting questions that come with Name-Image-Likeness freedom as it pertains to recruiting. That's been the prevailing fear since this profound change came along and remains so now that it's here.
Take college basketball for example. All that stuff the FBI stuff found on wiretaps a while back, all that stuff can very easily be made street legal now. Instead of Nike, adidas or Under Armour paying players under the table, they just need to do so, um, over the table. Best I can tell there's nothing stopping Nike from signing Zion Williamson as a high school sophomore, then paying him and his family through high school and college. The Swoosh probably couldn't explicitly require him to attend Duke because that would likely count as an "Inducement," but you know how it goes.
I want to make this clear, though: Simply from a Purdue perspective, the athletes these sort of dynamics would apply to, those aren't Purdue's bread-and-butter-type guys. That part of this shouldn't affect Purdue very much should some of these scenarios unfold.
