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Gold and Black Radio: Purdue football looks to SIU

Karpick_headshot500x500by: Alan Karpick09/02/25AlanKarpick
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As Purdue football prepares for Week 2 against Southern Illinois, GoldandBlack.com staffers Tom Dienhart and Dub Jellison talk with host Derek Schultz.

Audio

Purdue football thoughts

(Excerpt from Brian Neubert’s Three Thoughts Column)

Purdue couldn’t have gotten much more out of its 2025 opener than what you saw Saturday for the Boilermakers’ 31-0 win over Ball State.

First off, the fans showed up. It looked sparse as kickoff neared, but the crowd filled in nicely, making for a pretty decent crowd. Last year’s steadfast turnout was reflective of a real football school, but this is an interesting year in that fans are being asked to believe in yet another new coaching staff — it has to get old after a while — and this time they don’t know who the players are. And the TV product gets better and better. Maybe I’m making too much of all those dynamics; regardless, Purdue needs its people, and they showed.

And they saw a worthwhile product.

It wasn’t a perfect performance, but nobody even considered the possibility it would be. But it was a good performance. Purdue looked like a credible organization. Its thousand (give or take) newcomers showed well and played hard and its returnees and quasi-returnees (Ryan Browne, namely) looked improved.

Purdue needed to be solid. That was Step 1. This wasn’t a destination. Be wary of the fool’s gold that September buy-game wins can represent. But it was a good start, a great start, actually.

The little stuff was big. The line play was strong, the kicking game was perfect and the tackles Purdue missed were generally missed at top speed, an acceptable problem to have. When you miss a sack because you over-ran the play, there’s a conversation to be had about whether that’s even a negative play provided things don’t go to hell because of it.

The quarterback has plenty of room to grow here, but Saturday suggested Browne has a play-caller that knows what to do with him and a cast around him that has some potential. Some of those receivers looked ready to roll and an offensive line that got old and experienced overnight thanks to the portal was pretty, pretty good.

It’s just one game and one game does not a season make. But top to bottom, on the field and off the field, this went about as well as you could have hoped.

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