Express Thoughts: Purdue’s response

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 POST-NOTRE DAME RESPONSE

Purdue’s opportunity to make a statement against Notre Dame turned into a punchline and now the Boilermakers head to Oregon State in a wounded-animal sort of way, to use the worst cliché I can think of.

It’ll be a pride check, obviously, but also a test of this staff’s ability to weaponize historic defeat. “Embarrassment” is not my word; it was that of Ryan Walters. Fitting, for sure, but also one of those trigger terms rarely do you hear out loud around a microphone.

Human nature suggests there are now buttons to push here, but also pitfalls. You want to bring the best out of a team that should be embarrassed, but without being too negative and breaking its spirit. Again, these are young people and there’s often a fragility that comes with that. You have to know your team but how the hell do any of these coaches know their teams anymore when half their players were on different campuses eight months ago?

But embarrassment can be a hell of a motivator.

Ask Notre Dame.

You just saw it first-hand.

As much as that game was men vs. boys, the Northern Illinois loss might have been the biggest deciding factor there of all. This just as easily could have been a 28-7 slow-bleed that was never in doubt for a moment.The extent of the domination seemed a bit of a cathartic exercise for ND, which never stopped blocking and tackling and running hard, no matter how far into their depth chart they got.

Is Purdue capable of a similar response?

We shall see.

ON THE NEWCOMERS

The embarrassing loss came off as an indictment of many things — personnel, preparation, Xs-and-Os, whatever, but what it really didn’t reflect well on was the off-season portal haul.

Granted — and this is important — wide receiver CJ Smith and corner Nyland Green, the two gems of the class, are out, but neither would have made Purdue more physical, harder-hitting, or whatever else it needed in this particular matchup.

Part of the point of recruiting transfers is to get older and by extension, more developed physically and more experienced. That matters most at the line of scrimmage. Becoming more physical had to be an emphasis last spring and into the summer. Now, these newcomers should improve as they settle into the program and in Corey Stewart‘s case, get healthy, but for this one afternoon, Purdue looked no better off on the offensive line, at the rush end positions and in its aggregate tackling and blocking.

These are men, by and large, that are being brought into these programs and that theoretically should mean upgrade, but the reality of all this, too, is that college football’s rank and file is really just trading baseball cards in a lot of ways, hoping that when you lose your 45th-best player, someone else’s 56th-best player can become you’re 42nd-best player. You get the point.

During the Hungry, Hungry Hippos phase of the portal cycle — everyone just urgently chomping at loose marbles — how do you really know?

There’s a long season ahead — don’t lose sight of that — but Purdue’s first of many up-hill battles against a marquee opponent didn’t really inspire belief that this year’s portal imports have transformed this team to an upper-Big Ten level from a physical perspective.

And Notre Dame is not even the most physical or most talented team Purdue will even see this season.

ON CONVINCTION

Notre Dame took advantage quite often of the vulnerabilities in Purdue’s defensive scheme, yes, and that happens sometimes when one team has all the best players and a great, proven and richly experienced coaching staff, as Irish coordinators Mike Denbrock and Al Golden are.

There is no perfect system and there is no perfect anything, really. You do what you believe in, what has worked for you in the past and what you know. You keep teaching and you keep building. You keep trying to get better players and incubating competition among them.

What you don’t do is burn everything down on a moment’s notice because of one horrific loss to an opponent that has been your program’s superior since like the New Deal. The reason wins over Notre Dame are such a central piece of Purdue football history is because, well, more often than not, they’re not supposed to happen, so they’re sweeter and more memorable.

If you want Walters and his staff to just say, “To hell with what we’re doing here,” then that’s your right. If you want Mike Bobinski to flip out and micro-manage, then that’s your right, but I’ve got some pretty good stories about how micro-management has worked our for Purdue before. You don’t just blow stuff up on the fly. That’s not how things get built, as both Purdue football history and good sense tell us.

This was always a big-picture endeavor for Purdue investing in Ryan Walters, Graham Harrell, etc. Game 14 in the grand scheme of things is just another game.