Gold and Black Radio: Purdue Fall Camp Update
As Purdue football’s fall camp begins its third week, GoldandBlack.com’s Tom Dienhart and Dub Jellison break it all down for you with host Derek Schultz in our Aug. 12, 2025, edition. This week’s show is brought to you by our new sponsor Academy Sports+Outdoors.
Purdue Football: Neubert’s take
This is an excerpt from Brian Nuebert’s Three Thoughts from the Weekend Column.
ON PURDUE FOOTBALL
On the surface and until anything becomes really known and not just talked about about this retooled Purdue football program, here is the best way to look at things: Anything is possible. Well, almost anything. There is precedent for stunning Year 1 success sitting 90 minutes or so to the south just off that brand-new stretch of I-69. Expecting such things would be a bit nuts, but there are real reasons to view immediate success can be found, though it all depends on your definition of success.
Five broad points …
- There is nowhere to go but up. If Purdue wins four games this season, you’ve quadrupled your win total, have something to point to suggest things are moving in a positive direction, etc, You could credibly claim momentum. The optics matter.
- Early season success is attainable. Empty-calorie wins to open the season can at least put a pleasant taste in player’s mouths after last year’s team spent September sipping bleach and it destroyed the season. Winning begets winning even if the wins aren’t what you’d call quality wins.
- Purdue has a staff that has done this before and not every school can say that. Barry Odom and many of his coaches have been done this whole-new-team deal multiple times now and won. And while Purdue and UNLV are totally different organisms, Purdue and pre-NIL Missouri are pretty comparable and they won there, too. There is enough experience on this staff too to provide reason to think they made sound decisions in the portal market and didn’t get taken the way the easy-mark last staff did.
- There is some measure of continuity. Quarterback uncertainty is less than ideal this time of year, but there are enough UNLV guys around to provide a decent base that has experienced winning under this staff. If they’re effective leaders and culture-setters — and of course good players — they can really help everybody else. It reflects well on coaches when their players want to follow them to new places; it means they’re invested. High-major money is cool, too, though, but there’s money a lot of places.
- The line of scrimmage. The portal allows a team to get old and physically mature real quick, if you get the right guys in the right system and have a good offensive line coach. Purdue would seem to have those things, and having brought a few quality linemen from Vegas was huge.
We’ll see how it plays out. The Big Ten is a monster, but if things fall right and they get competent QB play and don’t plat self-destructive football, I don’t see why five or six wins would be an unrealistic marker considering you’re likely starting 2-0 eating Doritos before the protein shows up on the schedule.
