Weekly Word: Purdue in Florida, football's future and more

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.

NICEVILLE, Fla. — Greetings from Niceville, Fla., where things are, well, you guessed it, nice.

Purdue will hope for that sort of feeling this weekend, as it faces ranked VCU Friday night, then either Florida State or Tennessee Saturday, as its non-conference schedules of the past two years remain set on repeat, apparently.

Anyway, Purdue's 0-2 against high-major competition and now gets a couple chances not just for atonement but to continue what it hopes is an upward trajectory.

Out of a simple lack of original subject-matter ideas, here's a list of things that the off-campus portion of the Emerald Coast Classic may test, areas where the Boilermakers may need it.

Physicality: VCU is old, aggressive and will press Purdue, testing its strength with the ball, among other things, and Florida State or Tennessee aren't going to shy away from contact around the basket, rest assured.

These will be valuable gauges for Purdue, not just for the established players who can already be expected to rise to physical challenges — Nojel Eastern, Trevion Williams, Matt Haarms — but those who might be works in progress in that regard — Eric Hunter, Aaron Wheeler, etc. To be good this season, Purdue's going to have to play a certain way, the aggressor around the basket on offense and consistently physical on defense and the glass.

Here are a couple Big Ten-level games to help gauge its readiness.

Poise: VCU is going to press and press hard if Purdue gives any reason for it to believe such behavior would be a good idea.

Poised teams are less likely to get such treatment for fairly obvious reasons, and the last time Purdue truly needed to be a poised team, it literally fumbled a game away. Chances are, all these games at the Emerald Coast Classic will be close games decided by whichever team handles the slippery-slope moment the best.

Here's a good opportunity for Purdue to show it can be that team.

Passing: Jacksonville State was Purdue's best passing-and-catching game of the season, by a mile, giving the look of a team that benefited In a meaningful way from a week of practice, and just practice. Now we'll see what happens against high-major athletes with high-major bodies who are going to pressure the hell out of Purdue's ball-handlers.

Foul shooting: Purdue Is currently a thoroughly mediocre 63-percent at the free-throw line, and while the sample size remains small enough for the Marquette stench (9-of-21) to remain overpowering, the 70 percent the Boilermakers are shooting otherwise isn't exactly stellar.

Time will tell what Purdue's enduring reality at the stripe is, but thus far, the results have been mixed. This may not be a team, either, whose best foul shooters are going to be fouled most. Who are this team's best foul shooters, though?

The outcome of Saturday's Indiana game changes nothing about next season for Purdue, but it sure would enhance the sense that the Boilermakers made something of their tale-of-woe 2019 season, wouldn't It?

Purdue will win no more than five games this season, a year where more could have reasonably been expected. Yeah, it lost at Nevada with the fullest deck it would have all season, but after that, we all know why this season went as sideways as it did, and maybe with the off-season comes a much-needed luck reset.

Anyway, Purdue has a terrific corps of good young players coming back, enough to provide good reason to believe the Boilermakers should rebound next season.

Such thoughts have to be weighed against the questions that have also come out of this season, beyond simply, "Hey, who's not hurt this week?"

There is a reason Purdue right now is pointing its cannons in recruiting at 20-something-year-old linemen on both sides of the ball. The offensive line has gotten better through the course of the season, but remains an acute concern, and now Is about to lose one of its two best in Matt McCann. The interior of the line is the defense's soft underbelly and its returnees probably aren't going to transform in the span of an off-season. It just doesn't work that way.

Linebacker is a four-alarm personnel concern and the secondary is so squared away that Purdue is offering junior college players there, too.

Biggest yet: Quarterback.

Purdue's facing a two-year window here of Rondale Moore + David Bell and does so having little idea right now who its quarterback will be next year. Elijah Sindelar will go through senior day Saturday and may actually be saying good-bye, even though his sixth-year waiver was rubber-stamped by the NCAA months ago. Jack Plummer is hurt, and while Aidan O'Connell is a great story who's saved Purdue's bacon a couple times the past few weeks, it would be premature, I'd say, to suggest the past two-and-a-half games have brought enduring certainty to the most important position on the field.

The point here is this: Purdue's building a strong program, but gaps remain, and this fall, gaps have not only been spotlighted, but In some cases widened.

For that reason, the assumption that this injury-riddled season might just be a slight and fleeting deviation as opposed to something Purdue's going to have steer back onto course with all its might may be premature.

Unless this week's very public parting of ways between Rutgers and Greg Schiano amidst its monthslong coaching search was just bargaining-table theatrics, the coaching search that should have been a one-man search came up empty.

Rutgers blew it, given a chance to hire the guy who already knows how to win at a place that doesn't win, it blew it, seemingly refusing to commit to competitive football to a more meaningful extent, confirming that its simply in it as far as the Big Ten is concerned to cash the checks.

It brings to mind 2012, and the obvious undercurrent of Big Ten manifest destiny, that the league was cheapening itself competitively for the scratch that was going to come from penetrating new TV markets.

No criticism there. Jim Delaney wasn't running a non-profit for his membership, after all. But now years later, we can call it what it is, a money grab that both expanded and diluted the league's brand.

Competitively, Rutgers has basically been Northwestern of the 1980s, only with better bagels and worse infrastructure. But, hey, you knew that was going to be the deal. Rutgers had to know that was the deal, as it sold out its football and basketball programs. Steve Pikiell is doing good work there, in my opinion, and can the rest of his career there, and it won't matter, not even a little.

But this isn't just about Rutgers, but also Maryland, a crabcake college in a corn-country conference that at least brought a borderline blueblood basketball program with it, a borderline blueblood that still hasn't won a Big Ten title, I might add. Never mind the fact it also got the Big Ten associated with the FBI's college basketball probe, albeit in a bit role.

That's the worst part of the Big Ten's eastern bureau bust, not the bad sports, but the bad headlines, scandal after scandal from these two.

Never mind the fact that in football — the sport that drove expansion, obviously — Rutgers and Maryland will soon have combined for six coaches since joining the league. Worry more about the fact that one of Rutgers' coaches was fired in part for allegedly trying to influence one of his players' grades and one of Maryland's was fired after one of his players tragically perished, bringing to light allegations of meathead football culture at its worst.

Now, Rutgers faces serious allegations of abuse within its softball program, to which the athletic director, instead of crafting a message recognizing the severity of the accusations like any normal human would, called them "bullsh*t" and blamed the media.

That's what it's been with Rutgers and Maryland since they were welcomed into the Big Ten, much to their enrichment: Baggage and scandal, without competitive credibility to serve as counterbalance, not that it should be viewed as equally important anyway.

The Big Ten is fine. That TV money is robust.

It has certainly come at a cost, though.

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