Express Thoughts: In-season coaching move and more

GoldandBlack.com’s Express Thoughts from the Weekend column, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind.

ON PURDUE’S COORDINATOR CHANGE

It made so much sense and looked and sounded so right, Graham Harrell, the young and handsome former star quarterback with the great playing résumé and name-brand coaching résumé and all the football street cred that comes both, pairing with Ryan Walters’ energy, charisma and defensive mind to build Purdue.

Seemed perfect, a former star quarterback and spread-ish offense disciple coming to a school known for quarterbacks, most recently fellow Texan Drew Brees. If nothing else, it helped Purdue launder the perception it would be deviating from its history by hiring a defensive coach from a Big Ten rival running a prehistoric kind of offense.

But as it turned out, Graham Harrell was more a brand than anything. The Air Raid largely has bombed, low-lighted by this three-week run that cost Harrell his job this weekend.

Look, no one should celebrate people losing their jobs. No one should lose sight of the humanity in all this.

But following that Nebraska game, it was pretty evident some action was merited, as difficult as in-season coaching tumult can be, not only from an operational perspective, but on the players who are the most important part of this monster that college football has become.

Harrell needed to find answers to the questions of how to put these pieces at his disposal in positions to succeed and he didn’t seem to have much of anything. Is that his fault alone? It rarely is. Purdue is down some playmakers and who knows how things go out of public view, but the coordinators and head coach are those accountable, always.

The late-September transaction wasn’t altogether surprising. I walked out of that football building Saturday evening thinking something might be up and I’m certain I wasn’t alone.

Kudos, I suppose, to Walters and whoever else had a voice in this, for taking bold action here when circumstance merited it. Kudos to Purdue, I suppose, for eating a bunch of money in order to take bold action here when circumstance merited it.

This three-game skid has put a pillow over the energy and momentum Purdue hoped to not just maintain, but build upon, this season. If nothing else, this was a message to fans and donors whose interest-clock might be ticking that, no, this wasn’t good enough, scoring 38 points in three games against peer-level competition, only two touchdowns more than defenses have scored against you. To Harrell’s credit, he did help get Hudson Card to Purdue, but ever since, this two-year window of opportunity with your hand-picked quarterback has been squandered.

And things weren’t getting better.

It is difficult to predict whether things can improve offensively now, as we don’t know yet how this is going to work. There is no play-caller or meaty coordinator experience on the staff now, nor on the support staff. This isn’t Jeff Brohm’s staff, where there were always a bunch of old-head coaches hanging around in various roles.

Who knows what happens now?

One thing is pretty certain, however. After these past three weeks, it can’t get a whole lot worse.

ON WHAT SHOULD COME NEXT

Again, if anyone on the remaining offensive staff is promoted in-season to a coordinator role, they will be doing it for the first time in their careers, except for Marcus Johnson, who held the title of “run game coordinator” for two seasons at Missouri when Walters was there. There are no analysts or support types or just experienced guys in the fold to fill voids.

Can you go find some bored retiree or otherwise-idling coach to come in on a gig-economy basis for a few months to, at worst, consult? I don’t know. Maybe someone else’s analyst would come over. If there’s any decorum in college football anymore, I don’t know what decorum would be on that.

Maybe Purdue can piecemeal together a workable situation here with just what remains, but workable isn’t the standard, even under the circumstances. There’s too much money — and big-picture implications — at stake here to not exhaust every possibility to not just get plays installed and called, but to get better plays installed and called, even if it’s just a temp gig, punting the issue to the off-season, at which time Walters will already be filling a third vacancy from his original staff, this one being the most consequential.

You know, college football’s food chain is now such that low- and mid-major head coaches will leave their jobs to be Big Ten coordinators. Harrell was making seven figures. Perhaps there are good coordinators out there who could come with the ancillary benefit of experience of other forms.

It would be bold on a variety of levels, but Purdue knows Joe Moorhead well and it might be worth a phone call to broach the topic of a reprieve from him taking that dead-end job at Akron. Just me and only me thinking out loud there.

I also think that there are real angles to this next hire that ought to be pondered. Purdue is a passing school. Purdue is a quarterback school. All this is true. But you can stay true to those roots a lot of different ways. Every time I hear Walters, the defensive-minded coach, talk about “complementary football,” it brings to mind what that really means. It means an offense that helps its defense by possessing the ball and not making mistakes, but has enough punch to cash in on opportunities.

With this Air Raid derivative the past 16 games, it’s more often gotten the opposite.

ON PURDUE BASKETBALL

Hey, so, if you didn’t watch our interview with Matt Painter on Friday, do so. It’s right above this. You’ll see a guy come up with a take real time, and a good one, I might add.

That’s this: NIL and the portal, in which Purdue basketball has been a limited front-end participant in recruiting, has actually helped Purdue become what it is, a program that’s been No. 1 three consecutive seasons, just played for a national title and has a run of All-Americans going that would probably surprise the casual college basketball fan.

How? By adding a layer of filter in recruiting for Painter, who as you know, prioritizes players’ priorities heavily when perusing prospects.

There you go. Who would have thought that when lawless NIL and willy-nilly transfer culture came about that that would help Purdue?