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.
AN UNFORTUNATE ENDING
Let me put this in perspective real quick: Nojel Eastern — an important contributor for Purdue the past three seasons, a guy who helped the Boilermakers win a hell of a lot of games his first two seasons especially and the sort of human people ought to root for, in my experience — entered his name into the NCAA's transfer portal on Tuesday, May 12, during a pandemic, at a time when transfers can't take visits or so much as meet interested coaches in person. He leaves a year, I assume, short of a degree from Purdue University, trading down on that really, really important part of it for what I can only assume won't be an institution of international renown.
Unless the rules change effective immediately, he'll do so as a sit-one-to-play-one transfer, meaning whoever recruits him will have to dedicate two years of scholarship for one year of eligibility, affecting the scholarship numbers they're presently working with in recruiting. Not exactly a situation coaches run toward.
Unless he already has a school picked out and that school somehow didn't commit an NCAA violation in making itself that choice, he now must find his next stop, again, mid-pandemic, without being able to visit. In May.
Assuming Eastern must sit out a year at his next stop, a player who has now twice entered his name for NBA consideration has just tacked a fifth year onto the duration of his college life.
Look, nothing about these circumstances seems ideal, and while I have no right to judge the decisions anyone makes about their life, those circumstances make this a bit of an eye-opener.
Nojel Eastern must have really wanted out of Purdue, and must have only now come to that realization in mid-May, rather than at any point during the roughly two months since the season ended.
Or, those around him really wanted him out of Purdue, and that's the more likely explanation here.
