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.

Wednesday, Purdue announced an initiative that reflects the current pivot point of college athletics ground perfectly, a joint effort with the Krannert School and other partners to lay in place a comprehensive infrastructure for the Name-Image-Likeness Era, a new world order that can benefit those who are proactive and welcoming or damage those who aren't.

I'm not going to rehash all the nuts and bolts — read about them here — but such things represent both the new conditions on the ground and the new battleground as NIL gets jammed down the NCAA's throat.

Name-Image-Likness — which I'm choosing to write with hyphens because I think hyphens are cool — is student-athletes' ability to profit off their names, images and, uh, likeness. Commercials, camps, autograph signings, sponsored tweets and IG stuff, such things.