Express Thoughts: Purdue football's off-season agenda, Rutgers and more

Gold and Black Express Thoughts column, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind.

THE PURDUE OFF-SEASON AGENDA

Understandably testy after a disappointing maiden voyage at Purdue, Barry Odom didn’t have much to say about the immediate future after his team capped a winless Big Ten season Friday night, but that reality now comes at him and his staff like a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball high and tight.

First, Odom has to assess every member of his first Purdue staff and adjust accordingly.

Then, you’ve got to make a list nowadays.

Who do you want to keep from this roster? Before worrying about who you can keep, it’s about who you want to keep. It’s a callous, transactional game nowadays and it goes both ways.

Purdue needs better players, obviously. It needs more physicality and it needs, especially, more speed, just anything on offense a defense has to worry about. Like, anything. Also, Indiana showed how quick you can turn a defense with speed, quickness, effort and discipline.

It’s easier said than done, but Purdue’s organizational strength now gets tested more so than even a year ago. The program, contrary to popular belief understandably given the results, has foundational resources enough to be competitive. That is not an issue, or at least not a four-alarm issue. You can always have more.

But Purdue has never been good and probably never will be good without strong quarterback play, and that’s a key decision here, too, that must be honestly answered.

Purdue seems committed to Ryan Browne, but a man is only as loyal as his options, to quote Chris Rock.

I get it. Browne had very little to work with around him, his receivers too often caught footballs like they were bags of snakes and the protection was shoddy, an annual tradition various staffs have had to scheme around, as this one did.

But when you do not have bite offensively, that amplifies even more the lethality of turnover-prone quarterback play. Browne is a great competitor, to his credit, but a defining trait can become a toxic trait very quickly, and while every team wins and loses as a group, turnovers by the quarterback cost Purdue two Big Ten wins this season.

When your margin for error is thick as floss, can you continue on like this? You can live with disasters now and then when an offense is otherwise putting up yards and points. When it’s not …

To Browne’s credit, he made a lot of positive plays few others would. He made the throws schemed for him as often as not, especially early. And he is still relatively inexperienced. He can get better. Continuity matters. But so does avoiding mistakes and being able to drop back and make accurate pocket throws when necessary, preferably to receivers who can catch.

If you’re committed to Browne, cool, but your success next season is inordinately tied to his improvement this off-season and the staff’s ability to get him help, either in recruiting or scheme.

Purdue’s got to show a pulse next season and the quarterback has to be its heartbeat.

Barry Odom was the right guy for Purdue, and I don’t think a lousy first season changes that. Indiana is making everyone look bad right now, but don’t let that warp the reality at Purdue. It’s no consolation, but Purdue was two plays away from a pair of Big Ten wins and the baseline competence around the program was very different than before, in my opinion.

But this off-season is immense.

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ON PURDUE BASKETBALL AND RUTGERS

This is the game, folks, the one you should have circled on your calendars. Not Alabama, not Auburn or Iowa State. Rutgers.

This December Big Ten road opener has been a house of horrors for the Boilermakers, for whatever reason.

Purdue has been markedly better than all these teams — Rutgers, Northwestern, Penn State, Nebraska — but still seems to lose this game every year.

If Purdue has a vengeful streak to it, it should come out in Jersey. Hard as they played at Alabama and against Texas Tech, and as much as could have taken from Memphis turning that game into an eyesore, the Boilermakers should be primed here and ready for anything.

Purdue’s again the big ticket in town and inferior teams are gonna go urban-warfare mode. These guys have all been through it and know the deal. They have to be physical aggressor, they have to ignore the refs and just be smart.

The standard is really high for this team, because it is elite, but elite teams don’t let themselves get dragged into the mud and lose control of their outcomes. That’s where this team has to prove its different from its predecessors by not playing down to the level of its competition.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL COACHES GONE WILD

If Lane Kiffin loses his mind and leaves a great situation at Ole Miss for a treacherous one at LSU, he will have taken another turn in perhaps the strangest coaching arc ever in sports. Larry Brown is really the only other coach that comes to mind that has moved this much, melted down this often and still won so big. College football is a reality show, plain and simple, and Kiffin has been its drama, the guy who constantly weaves between protagonist and antagonist, a Steve Spurrier-level troll with an uncanny knack for always being the headline.

Kiffin is a great example of these people just being sociopaths, unable to just ride great, comfortable situations instead of chasing some nebulous concept of more.

If they’d ever just stay, college football would be so much better off.

Water always finds its level in college football, because Ole Miss’ coach won’t stay and try to make Ole Miss into LSU. Schools might have pockets of great success, but it’s always going to be the schools with the money, the followings, the brands and the recruiting bases. Indiana might feel like Ohio State right now, but they’ll be Maryland again in no time, history tells us. Purdue hoped for sustained success back in the 2000s, but what happened after highlighted critical errors but also the brilliance of what led to the success in the first place.

It is a rigged sport, and as long as Lane Kiffins keep leaving great situations for toxic ones just because of money and prestige, it’ll stay that way. Good luck with that governor, Coach, and I hope you have a good lawyer for when things go sideways.