Indiana is the number one team in the country.
Thanks, Mark Cuban!
One tiny thing? There might be five teams outside of the Big Ten/SEC that can move enough merchandise to make up the difference. Notre Dame, Florida State... maybe Miami and Clemson.
Congrats, you are in the top 40. In the CFB landscape you are a billionaire complaining that you don't have as much money as Bill Gates.
You are born on third base, pretending you got struck out looking.
Listen, I don't deny the advantage that Purdue has being in the B1G. We're lucky that the B1G doesn't toss members to the sharks, because if they did, we'd have been jettisoned long ago.
But this is the difference... In the NFL, you have a HARD salary cap, you have a draft, you have a CBA. You have everything in the world that exists to ensure parity. That generally means that if one owner has $400B and another owner has a "mere" $10B, the teams will still be equal.
This isn't the case in MLB, which is why big-market teams like the Yankees and the Dodgers beat the piss out of everyone else. In other sports, those who have the most money have the best rosters.
In college, it's that taken to its logical extreme. If you have a "mere" $10B and your competition is Gates/Musk/Bezos/Buffett level wealth, they can outbid you for every single player, every single time, and barely even feel a pinch at all to the nut. That is a STRUCTURAL imbalance. Elite players are a finite resource, and the rich(est) can buy as many as they want, starving the rest of talent. That's how it works. The top programs already get the top HS recruits. Now with NIL and unrestricted transfer portal, they buy the top transfers, so any lesser program who identifies "under the radar" talent loses that talent.
Purdue is advantaged... Maybe even born on first base. That's a long way away from scoring compared to the programs born on third base.