Big Picture: Things got even worse at Wisconsin

Big Picture is GoldandBlack.com’s half-heartedly named post-game opinion/analysis piece, written by Brian Neubert after most Purdue football games.

There’s no way to put this softly, nor any reason to put it softly at all: This was rock bottom for Purdue.

I’ve seen rock bottom before at Purdue, seen it up close, and it looked wholly like what you saw Saturday from the middling Boilermakers in Camp-Randall Stadium, that big, raucous structure that has been about as kind to Purdue as an iron maiden for many, many years, mostly against Badger teams far better than this one.

No one thing mattered more than any other in Saturday’s unthinkable 52-6 loss to a very pedestrian Badger team. And that’s precisely the problem, that nothing really mattered, that once again it felt like the game was decided by an early mistake.

This wasn’t a game where the offense let down the defense or the defense let down the offense or the special teams let down either; everything let everything down. This was ostensibly over as soon as Wisconsin’s touchdown one play after a muffed punt decided the outcome, because so damn much has to go right right now for Purdue to just compete against peer-level competition, and right now, nothing is going right.

There are no positives right now; that’s just the reality of it. You’re watching the games, and so is anyone who might take exception to that comment. There’s not.

The offense looked different and refreshingly purposeful to open the game, then fizzled out on red-zone opportunities handed it by the defense and finished the game batting .090 on third down. Don’t judge the new offensive leadership solely on this game, though. This was a tough deal and you could at least see what Purdue was trying to do early on.

But the back-handed positive here is that Purdue actually was positioned for red-zone offense to be a problem.

That was thanks to the defense, a defense that is just on skates right now.

You play man and can’t do it without getting buried in flags; you play zone and don’t get any pass rush, or in today’s third quarter, barely try to get a pass rush. That’s a tough look for a system built around man-to-man coverage and rushing the passer. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, definitely damned if you get chased out of your convictions.

Then, the fumbled punt, the moment after which things started coming apart.

Look, sometimes things get worse before they get better, and this is worse than last season, which wasn’t an abject failure, in my opinion. This is a big-picture, long-term project, but this stage of that project is about foundation, and if Purdue is going to keep being this penalty-ridden, this mistake-prone and then respond to a 21-6 halftime deficit by getting scored on every single time after halftime, then it looks like that foundation is being built on paper mache. Worse than that 21-6 halftime deficit was that 31-0 second half. Wisconsin running out the clock at the end snapped a string of six straight scores in the game’s final 30 minutes and nine seconds.

I’m not here to question anyone’s heart or whatever there, but showing a little bit of fight there after halftime would have at least been something.

Notre Dame was the worst loss in school history by various standards; in light of the situation and the opponent today, this was worse.

And now what? If this doesn’t get dramatically, profoundly and likely improbably, better, there are going to be more days like this this season, and this is rock bottom, and once you hit rock bottom, it is damn hard to get it back.