Izzo's comments reinforce a conversation I had a month ago with a well known past Purdue football player who is still tight with the Purdue athletics community. He claims there are a lot of NCAA basketball coaches who are rooting for Purdue and Painter to be successful in the NCAAs. Thay are frustrated with the disruption the NIL and portal have brought to the coaching world. They see Painter as an example of a coach who has mostly avoided the portal process and proved to be successful by doing old-style recruiting and player development. If he can leverage that into a run to the final four, then that will give these coaches the evidence they need to get back to a player development style as opposed to continuous portal recruitment.
This was echoed by a conversation I had with a D-1 coach with 100s of wins. He expressed his frustration with the whole portal recruitment process. He would recruit a good player and then have to re-recruit the player each season to try to retain them in his program. He claimed the constant recruitment and retention has taken a lot of the fun out of coaching and the self-satisfaction of allowing him to fully develop players and men.
Bottom line, I think a deep run by Purdue could have an impact beyond our own program. Hopefully, it could partially start a movement to return college basketball to a more stable player recruitment-development process.
