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.
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Well …
Barring anything surprising — shocking, really — Purdue will get blue-chipper Rondale Moore on Jan. 6 and make another significant splash on the recruiting scene, not just by landing an outstanding prospect, but by flipping said prospect from a blueblood program, though this outcome has been in the works for months, really. That won’t change the optics, however, and those optics will reflect very well on a Boilermaker program that’s scored so much positive notoriety and momentum in recent months.
• We have very compelling reason to believe that Purdue is holding off on junior college linebacker Evander Craft because it believes it might have something brewing on the graduate transfer front, indications being that it may come from Western Kentucky.
We don’t know who, and the WKU roster shows multiple redshirt juniors, but if it’s first-team All-C-USA linebacker Joel Iyiegbuniwe, then it’s the T.J. McCollum story all over again, potentially.
Obviously, these things are delicate and fluid, but we know that Craft has been told of the situation. For his part, he’s landed some MAC offers lately, so he wouldn’t be out in the cold if Purdue moves away from him and the new offers might be an indication that things are moving in that direction.
As we told you weeks ago, Purdue will dip its toe into the quarterback recruiting market in coming weeks, maybe in hopes of finding an older QB to come in this spring and add some seasoning to its group.
With it now being confirmed that Elijah Sindelar will require ACL surgery, sidelining him for spring, and with David Blough very unlikely to be in any position to practice fully at QB, Purdue is left with just redshirt freshmen Nick Sipe and Griffin Alstott (who’s been hurt, too) and incoming freshman Jack Plummer as its scholarship QBs this spring.
Who Purdue would look at, who it can even get at this point and whether it would be deemed worth it to scholarship what might amount to a placeholder remains to be seen.
It would seem as if Sindelar staked his claim to the job to end this season, Blough has proven himself, the staff is infatuated with Plummer and the two youngsters will get their chance this spring, so the window of opportunity for a new, older QB to come and actually win the job might not be great. But Purdue wants competition at every position and right now, it’s compromised at that position for spring at least.
But also, when you deal with major injury, you have to prepare for every outcome, so bringing in an older QB could also provide some insurance-policy value come the fall, too, and keep you out of positions where you have to throw young players on the field faster than you’d like.
It’s fair to say that any graduate-transfer offensive lineman that hits the wire will get a look. And defensive tackle could fall into that category, too, in light of Eddy Wilson’s unknown status.
Attrition of some kind will hit Purdue and that will go a long way in determining how much space it has to play with. You can always be surprised but we’d think the group of players already signed would be pretty secure academically because Purdue seemed to be very intent to minimize risk on that front. It put off on signing Willie Lane over last-second concerns. Whether he’s still a possibility to sign, we honestly don’t know. (BN)
Campbell’s birthday is Jan. 9 and that might be a key date.
He’s made a return visit to Purdue and a return visit to DePaul, both unofficially, and we’d think he’d make an official visit to Maryland, too, before deciding. The Terps have apparently offered, but that’s been kind of a lukewarm sort of thing for them since they got involved very late prior to the early signing period.
Purdue still makes all the same sense it did in November, when Campbell could have signed with the Boilermakers, but didn’t. Purdue needs a point guard to come in next season, a retooling season of sorts after the program’s 2014 class departs.
But again Campbell had that chance and chose not to sign, and sometimes when things make a ton of sense, they make too much sense to actually happen.
We figured he pushed things to spring to allow a whole new crop of schools to come in. That may not be the case, as this could be boiling down to the same schools he was looking at before, though Maryland might be more a player now than it was before.
DePaul did just sign that Australian guard, but that may not necessarily mean they’re out. They’ve got a lot invested in this one and have already kept on Campbell before when things looked bleak.
It’s very early, but Purdue has certainly started looking around at other guard options for the spring, and if Campbell’s not going to happen, then it would be beneficial for Purdue to find that out sooner rather than later. Conversely, if he is going to wind up at Purdue, then getting that ironed out quickly would be equally to its benefit, because that’s not the Boilermakers’ only need for next season and not the only scholarship to be filled. (BN)
Seniors Ja’Whaun Bentley, McCollum and Danny Ezechukwu won’t be easily replaced/can’t be replaced overnight
But Purdue does return a stud in Markus Bailey and likes its young linebackers — sophomores-to-be Derrick Barnes, Tobias Larry and Cornell Jones, all of whom didn’t redshirt this season — enough that it didn’t go crazy at the position in recruiting this year.
It recruited some high-end linebackers early, but when Justice Dingle and Chase Kline went to Georgia Tech and Michigan State, respectively, it was OK taking freshman Jaylan Alexander and one older player, whether that winds up being Craft or someone else.
Translation: Purdue’s opinion on last year’s linebacker signees was highlighted by its actions with this year’s class, highlighting the fact that Boilermaker coaches are comfortable with those young players’ ability to be ready now. They’ll certainly need to be.
But either way, linebacker will be an emphasis in 2019, starting with Jack Kiser. (BN)
While it’s certainly disappointing for the player — and his team — to have only been cleared to play through mid-January, and less than ideal for a player who’s not played a hell of a lot of basketball in his life, it’s believed that his eligibility at Purdue will be unaffected by all this.
Had his eligibility clock been triggered, then that would be a situation where Purdue absolutely would work to get him to campus now, as it did Matt Haarms for that redshirt-season scenario that worked out so well before.
But while Dowuona did repeat ninth grade, in effect, that simply means that this season is the same as a post-graduate season for him, which is permissible under NCAA eligibility guidelines. Haarms was essentially determined to be on his second post-grad season, which is not permissible without the eligibility drain starting.
So, in effect, much ado about very little. (BN)
There are obvious guys out there you take whenever you can, obviously, but Jeff Brohm’s M.O. at both Western Kentucky and in his limited timeframe at Purdue has been more aligned with the summer surge. Purdue could have had a bunch of commitments prior to June last year, but didn’t push for them. When June hit, so did it, and the dominoes started falling so fast, Purdue had to hit the brakes on it, then wound up moving away from a number of those players over time.
Purdue has built up more in-state cache then probably could have been expected this quickly, the program is hot in Louisville and the national brand has been enhanced tenfold with not only Purdue’s success, but the fun nature of that success. That game last night in which it won in dramatic fashion, throwing for 400 yards and running a fake kneel-down, that was on national TV.
The Boilermaker program does have a lot going for it right now and it will be interesting to see if Brohm and Co. try to strike while that iron is hot this early, or play it cool again. There are 2019 players out there listing Purdue offers who would not be taken at this point, while there obviously are players who absolutely would be taken. That line between the two might be different now, though, than it was before.
Keep in mind: The new early signing period structure gears January much more toward the class to follow and that could accelerate a process that's been speeding up for years. (BN)
