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Welcome to this week's “BOILING OVER,” GoldandBlack.com’s weekly information-clearinghouse and analysis column meant for our site members and site members only. We appreciate everyone’s cooperation in helping us keep what is sometimes delicate or proprietary information confined to this message board. This feature allows us to be more flexible in our reporting, to our readers' benefit, and we lose that ability if we can't keep this feature secure and the value of our site's membership at its peak. Additionally, we address recruiting and hiring processes in-depth and often without filter in this feature and we do it behind a subscription-protected barrier for a reason, in hopes of avoiding situations where our reporting can impact the recruiting process, which can happen occasionally.
So again, we appreciate everyone's cooperation very much.We know there are a lot of aggregator blogs out there, and a lot of you are on Twitter and other message boards. We don’t want to come off like Darth Vader (before he turned good at the end of "Return of the Jedi" of course) here, but we would be doing all our subscribers a disservice if weren’t proactive about protecting the value of their membership.
Honestly, this may be the deadest recruiting week of the year right now — and I'm not forgetting that there was a pandemic — so you'll have to bear with us when things get a little light.
PURDUE FOOTBALL RECRUITING
So, Saturday is the first game-day recruiting event at Purdue in forever, and the crowd in Ross-Ade Stadium Saturday evening will probably be mostly players who are already committed.
Among the commits expected to attend: Joe Strickland, Brady Allen, Terence Thomas, Vince Carpenter, Cross Watson and Domanick Moon.
The big/only uncommitted 2022 visitors we're aware of will be West Lafayette's Mo Omonode, who Purdue is still awaiting a decision from. Obviously with the local guys, visiting is pretty easy, so we'd suspect he'll make more than one game-day visit this season. He is going to try to get to Arkansas State, as well, at some point.
Couple underclassmen ...
The junior defensive lineman from Cathedral has already been offered by Purdue, Penn State, Notre Dame and a slew of others.
New Palestine lineman Luke Burgess already has P5 offers. We've seen him at camps and at his game this past weekend and though he plays defensive end — that's what he did at the Rivals Camp in Indy — he should be recruited as an offensive tackle, IMO. He's so tall and long and has a frame to be massive, and he's pretty light on his feet for a big kid. Purdue is interested, but hasn't offered yet, far as we know.
Cathedral sophomore quarterback Danny O'Neil may be the state's next up-and-comer at the position and QBs always start their recruiting processes pretty early.
Also: 2024 Michigan cornerback Jamir Benjamin is a potential national recruit from the Detroit area who already has a Michigan State offer, among others. He's very close with Purdue redshirt freshman Anthony Rompf.
Benjamin visited for Purdue's practice of training camp, also.
Also, Michigan City sophomore running back Jaden Hart is due to visit. He already has a Purdue offer, among others.
We'll have some updates and stuff after the weekend, so stay tuned. (BN)
PURDUE BASKETBALL RECRUITING
Junior-year officials start this weekend, as Purdue hosts Cathedral's Xavier Booker for his first official visit. The No. 37 player in the 2023 class according to Rivals.com, Booker used his first unofficial visit back In the summer on Purdue and now his first official visit (we think) on Purdue.
Indiana, Notre Dame, Louisville, Ohio State and Illinois are some others who figure to be pretty involved at this early stage, with the distinct possibility more offers come his way the next year or so, should he play things out. Before you ask, there's absolutely no reason to think a commitment could occur this weekend. That would be astonishing.
Purdue will also host prior commitment Myles Colvin for his official visit, too, and that may be by design. Booker and Colvin do have some history we think, and it generally makes for a better visit experience when recruits are surrounded by familiar faces, especially when they'd be prospective teammates.
As far as we know, Booker and Colvin are the lone two visitors of any kind for basketball this weekend.
We'll get a hold of Booker after the weekend for a quick story. (BN)
PURDUE BASKETBALL RECRUITING
So yesterday, Purdue's affinity for giants again was a thing, as the Boilermaker coaching staff offered Sweden's William Berg during a Zoom meeting.
He's 7-foot-1, 270 pounds, and we do know that Matt Painter has been partial to continuing to find centers of that sort of physical profile since they've had some success with it lately. Normally a coach who'd just recruit the best players he could then piece things together accordingly, Painter may now he trying to adhere to a more defined blueprint, at least at that position.
William Berg (right)
Berg's recruitment has obviously been affected by the pandemic. If there was no COVID, he'd likely be going to school in America right now, in fact, and his profile would be considerable in the U.S. That he's remained in Sweden has probably kept him under the radar some and obviously none of these coaches have seen him in person.
As of today, Berg has offers from Purdue, Cal-Riverside, Iona and Montana State. The calculus for international players is often very different in recruiting, but needless to say, if that were the final list, Purdue would probably be a wise bet.
That said, there are high-majors involved. Creighton, Oklahoma, Stanford and Texas Tech among them, as well as some good mid-majors and the Ivy League, and the public Purdue offer will send up a bat signal for everyone else to come recruit this kid, most likely.
So we'll see where things end up for him, but the first challenge will be for him to try to make visits.
That's complicated right now, but Berg would like to at least not commit to a school before he can visit "if I can."
This would appear to be Purdue's guy now. It has been targeting center in this class and passed on some good players in order to keep its options open. Berg is what they've come up with, at least from the high school ranks. The transfer market is still a last resort.
This is a different deal from Purdue's prior recruitments of internationals Matt Haarms, Emmanuel Dowuona and Zach Edey. They were all in the States at the time they were recruited and none of them evaluated/recruited during a pandemic. Purdue's going off film and word of mouth on Berg and perhaps beat everyone to the punch again on a player who may not be viable in every system, but would fit well in what Purdue has going right now.
I'll write a full story next week. (BN)
PURDUE BASKETBALL
• Trey Kaufman-Renn has apparently trimmed down considerably the past few weeks as he continues to work toward becoming quicker and more agile and stuff. He became bigger and stronger leading into his senior year as opposed to lighter and quicker, perhaps a function of that ankle injury that plagued him.
• Brian Waddell, who people continue to gush about, is around 180 now, apparently. No idea what he was when he showed up, but it couldn't possibly have been much more than 160. He needs size and strength badly, and that's a big part of the reason he will redshirt this season.
• Mason Gillis is almost certainly going to be sidelined to start the season. The number we've heard suggested is six games, but we do want to point out that that is the amount Ryan Cline got when he faced his situation years ago, but that counted Purdue's closed scrimmage and exhibition game that year, so it amounted to four regular season games.
Here's where the timing of this gets sticky, though: If it's four regular season games, the fourth game would be North Carolina in Connecticut, and then the suspension would lift for the following day's game against either Villanova or Tennessee. We don't know how this going to be handled for certain yet, but we'll see if the number is six, whether they'd introduce him back — assuming he's done what he's needed to do to get back in good standing, which he has to this point — mid-event or hold him out until after Connecticut.
Caleb Furst and Kaufman-Renn will have the 4 position to themselves in the meantime.
• Here's your regular reminder that the Big Ten schedule is expected any day now. Next week, we're told.
PURDUE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT
Mike Bobinski told us today that Purdue will wind up with only a $7.5-million loss for the pandemic year, in part due to the More Than A Game campaign, in part due to some restructuring of some expenses, as well as the cost-cutting measures that were taken. Bobinski said he believes that to be the smallest shortfall in the Big Ten and a mere fraction of some.
See the full interview tomorrow on our 'Gold and Black LIVE' show.
THURSDAY NIGHT LIVE
Don't forget to check out Alan and Tom live at 7 p.m. at the Purdue Union Club Hotel for our Thursday Night Live Show.
The show will be broadcast on Facebook Live and linked on our front page at show time.
TV history will be made tonight. You do not want to miss this. (BN)
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