I’m not writing a traditional preview for the Michigan game. I don’t want to write one, and it’s clear most of y’all don’t want to read one. Instead of hating this job for the next four weeks, I’m going
to do something different. Let’s focus on the positive and …
Follow Northwestern’s Path Out of the Basement.
Generally speaking, when your college football team is yearning for the success of Northwestern, things are bleak, and folks, it doesn’t get much more dismal than Purdue’s current 15-game Big 10 losing streak. Not only has the post-Jeff Brohm era been an unmitigated disaster in West Lafayette, but Purdue fans must endure the indignity of second-ranked Indiana, Hoosier football, mixed with a heaping side of jealousy. I get it —it’s tough to look at what Coach Cignetti has cooking down in Bloomington and not want that for Purdue. The problem is, every program in the nation wants what Indiana has at the moment, and that is the weirdest sentence I’ve typed during my time writing for Hammer and Rails. To steal a line from William Butler Yeats, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”
What a time to be alive.
My wife assures me that hitting the lottery is not a valid financial plan (Then again, she married an English major, so you may want to take any financial advice she provides with a grain of salt.). Purdue, like 95% of college football teams, must continue to trudge forward one step at a time, instead of hitching a ride on the Cignetti express. The Boilermakers took their first step towards respectability immediately following last season’s 66-0 annihilation by the Hoosiers: firing Ryan Walters.
Mike Bobinski could have picked a random person off the street to coach Purdue this season, and it would have been an improvement, but he took things a step further and hired an actual football coach. He plucked Barry Odom out of the Nevada desert and provided him with a team that, if nothing else, he couldn’t make any worse. I firmly believe the 66-0 loss to Indiana is the nadir of Purdue’s not-so-glorious football tradition. It wasn’t scraping the bottom of the Purdue barrel; it was moving the barrel and excavating the overflowing septic tank under the barrel.
I know things haven’t worked out the way anyone hoped this season, including coach Odom, but the good thing about following a coach like Ryan Walters is that there is some built-in grace. Walters was so bad that he’s still losing games for Purdue, even as the Washington defensive coordinator. I’m giving Coach Odom a pass on this season’s futility, but it would be nice if Purdue could take something positive out of an otherwise depressing campaign. I don’t see any wins left on the schedule (If this were a just and fair world, Purdue beats Washington, but…shrugs shoulders), but that doesn’t mean Purdue can’t use the next four games to set itself up for a more hopeful 2026.
Purdue needs to channel their inner Wildcat
Before Coach Cignetti took the Big 10 by storm, Northwestern’s David Braun quietly authored one of the biggest turnarounds in Big 10 history. He won eight games in 2023 as a first-time head coach, after Northwestern managed a single victory in a train wreck of a 2022 season.
Then he did it again.
An injury-ravaged 2024 saw his team revert to the Northwestern we all know and love to see on the schedule. They won four games early and collapsed down the stretch. Coach Braun could have pulled the plug on the roster. Instead, he stayed the course, held onto his top talent, and brought in a few complementary pieces (including a new quarterback). As a result, his squad is right back in the mix in 2025. Northwestern should make a bowl game, barring a complete disaster. If I were an athletic director looking for a new leader from my program, I’d take a look at Baun. No one has done more with less over the last three seasons of college football. If you can build a program in Evanston, it stands to reason that you can do the same thing in Happy Valley, Tallahassee, or maybe even Baton Rouge (someone inform the governor of Louisiana!).
Braun’s elite coaching skill is his ability to identify a team’s strengths and build around them.
Northwestern’s 2024 season wasn’t a complete waste despite the poor showing because he learned from that squad and put that knowledge to work this season. Most teams would head back to the portal in search of a quick fix, but not Northwestern. Despite several poor performances, he knew what he had with his returning defense and resisted the urge to purge the roster. Instead of spending the off-season trying to incorporate new players into their defensive scheme, they worked on perfecting their defensive scheme. The thing that impressed me the most about the Wildcats’ defense on the way to their shutout over Purdue was their positioning. Everyone was where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there. They made Purdue earn every yard with the assurance that the Boilermakers would eventually self-destruct.
That brings me to the Northwestern offense.
Coach Braun knew what he had returning on defense and built his offense around the idea that his defense would be solid. Coach Braun didn’t enter the offseason looking to tear his offense down to the studs and start over. When a coach completely tears down a unit, they lose all the hard lessons learned from the previous season. Oftentimes, players learn more from losing than they do from winning. The offense was bad, horrific even, but if it had a strength, it was the left side of the offensive line. Coach Braun wanted a ball-control, run-heavy team that worked in tandem with his defense, and he went out and invested in two graduate transfer offensive linemen with extensive resumes. He brought in plug-and-play right guard Evan Beernsten out of South Dakota State and then took mammoth 6’7”, 350-pound Martes Lewis from Minnesota. Lewis played right guard for the Gophers, but Northwestern kicked him out to right tackle because they’re more interested in running the ball than throwing the ball.
Here’s what I find most interesting about Northwestern’s offense. They are winning games despite SMU quarterback transfer Preston Stone being awful. That’s unusual. Missing on a transfer quarterback is usually a death sentence for a team, but because Northwestern had enough infrastructure built around Stone, they’re winning despite him. The Wildcats don’t need Stone to be good; they need him to turn around and hand the ball off and complete passes to receivers in single coverage on occasion. When it gets beyond that and Stone is asked for more, he starts throwing the ball to the wrong team (x4 Tulane, x2 vs Nebraska), but when the run game is working, it doesn’t particularly matter.
If Northwestern hit on a quarterback, who knows? Maybe we’re talking about a one-loss Northwestern team fighting it out with an unbeaten Indiana squad at the top of the Big 10 standings. Even without a quarterback, they’re still respectable, and I think that’s what it takes to build a consistent program.
OK? So what? I thought this was a Purdue Blog. Why am I reading about Northwestern?
I’m looking for any glimmer of light at the end of this pitch-black, seemingly endless tunnel of football despair. I started out trying to write a Michigan preview, but I don’t see the point. There is no magic bullet. There is nothing Purdue can do that should remotely bother Michigan on either side of the ball. There are only so many ways to write, “the other team has more talent, we need to hope they turn it over in bad spots, while at the same time, not turning it over ourselves, and even if that happens, it most likely won’t matter.” If this Purdue team played this Michigan team 100 teams, Michigan wins, at minimum, 95 times.
FanDuel is giving the Wolverines three touchdowns and the hook, and that seems about right.
Since no one is reading the traditional previews much anyway, I’m going to change things up. Instead of worrying about the other team, I’m going to focus on areas of strength that I think the Boilermakers can build upon for next season. I’ll let you know what I’m looking at on Friday before the game, and I’ll report back with the results early next week. I want to identify areas where Purdue can duplicate Northwestern’s current model.
Things are bad now, and I expect them to get worse down the stretch. If you are still watching the games, I thought it would be nice to have something to focus on other than the score. Instead of a “preview,” I will provide a short guide (in separate articles, which will be up in a few minutes) on places Purdue might have success and how that success could carry over to next season.
Maybe it will make your Saturday noon slightly more tolerable.
Maybe not.
At least it’s something to write about.
