Big Picture: This loss was different

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

This profoundly disappointing — shocking, really — Purdue football season has come with a bunch of different shades of “worst,” from the sheer magnitude of Notre Dame, to the utter helplessness of Wisconsin to the hopelessness of Oregon, with a few of the hardest games still to come.

This loss to Northwestern, this 26-20 overtime loss, wasn’t necessarily the worst of these seven straight defeats, but it was a whole new layer.

This was a game Purdue could win, and could have won, a game in which it wasn’t really outplayed, but lost anyway. I can’t really say a team that never led should have won, but … Purdue should have won, same way they should have won at Illinois and would have had that fumble been called correctly.

Today, the Boilermakers actually showed an offensive pulse as Hudson Card invigorated the passing game, and the whole team showed a competitive heartbeat in rallying back from down 17-3, which would have meant game over most outings this season.

Purdue was good enough to win, but lost anyway, again, a game that was mismanaged as much as the home team was outplayed.

At least Ryan Walters had an informed explanation for going for it on fourth down in the overtime. It wasn’t just a whim. Had it been a whim, it would have been coaching malpractice. As it was, it was just wrong.

Less-than-optimal ball placement or not, fourth-and-six is no gimme, not in sudden-death mode. Maybe you miss the kick, but maybe you don’t, and you can finally play with a lead and you can shift all the pressure to Northwestern and its T-shirt gun passing game. Easy to say now, but that possibility should have superseded the particulars of the kick. Spencer Porath is on scholarship and just was dealt the vote of no confidence of all votes of no confidence after making two (shorter) kicks to help position you to win.

That decision ended badly, but so did the over-aggressive fourth-down in Purdue territory in the first half.

Northwestern is not a good team and its offense is not good. Granted, Purdue has one of its worst defenses ever, but the risk of handing the Wildcats a short field there was not worth the upshot of maintaining a drive that still had a long way to go to score. And again, fourth-and-medium is no layup; nothing has been for Purdue this season. Punt the ball. Your punter might be your best player.

This is all crystal-clear hindsight, mind you, on sequences that could have gone either way, but sequences that have been going the wrong way nine times out of 10 season.

I’d mention not taking the 10 yards on the holding call before Northwestern’s second-half field goal but I can’t in good conscience call that wrong while also pointing out Purdue’s awful third-and-long defense, just back-breaking swings that go horribly wrong when things prior have gone right.

Which brings us to the defense.

Purdue’s myriad problems this season have distracted from arguably the core problem. The Boilermakers have the worst Power 5 defense in the country. That can measured a few different ways, but scoring is the most important, right?

They have been so porous and gaffe-prone and undisciplined that it feels like Purdue has been chased out of its intended defensive identity — pressuring the quarterbacks, disrupting passing routes, ganging up on the football, things like that — and has just become a glass jaw that too often concedes opportunities to pressure the quarterback and sits back in a bite-less zone easily picked apart by quarterbacks permitted too much time to throw. If you’re going to go down, go down swinging.

The offense did today. Good for Card, who gave you a glimpse of what his Purdue career to this point should have looked like. Purdue should have deviated from the two-quarterback plan after those two opening possessions when it was evident the passing game would work today. If you need to get Ryan Browne in there, maybe wait ’til the red zone, where his running punch might have been better used on a shortened field. Browne completed three passes in his two drives, one being a third down stopped short of the sticks and another being a fourth down stopped short of the sticks. (The other was a well-timed screen that worked, but a two-yard throw.)

You have to pass to win.

On a positive note, Ryan Walters is going a better job calling offense than his former offensive coordinator ever did. The flip side of that is that the young head coach who made his bones as a defensive coordinator and still needs experience thinking like a head coach at all times continues to learn on the job as an offensive coordinator, when the head coach’s job is so much more than just tethered to one side of the ball. Something has to be getting lost in the shuffle here, right?

It’s not an ideal situation, but the results this season have been a combination of a lot of things.

Today was another chapter in this season born under a bad sign. And maybe the most disappointing, which is really saying something.