Purdue Boilermakers Football 2023 Season Autopsy

I’d like to know why you’re interested in learning more about Purdue’s defensive scheme breakdowns, run blocking, and passing attack tactics. Midway through the basketball season is here. Right now, what type of total loser wants to read about Purdue football? Second, I apologize; that kind of material is probably going to be mentioned inadvertently in this post.

This feels more like a post-mortem Purdue football game. That seems appropriate given that players rarely stay on for more than a season in this day of transfer portals. Thus, more significant than determining which players [insert SEC school here] ought to attempt to poach, I’ll wrap up with my personal perspective on the Purdue football experience of 2023. Personally, I find that it more closely aligns with how I prefer to conduct investigations at work. Yes, I can, and frequently do, spend weeks gathering and analyzing data, running experiments, and speaking with specialists. I feel much more satisfied when I can just refer to a duck as a duck. Oregon, you keep out of this conversation! For a short while, I don’t have to acknowledge you.

I promise I won’t talk about punting or kicking because unlike Kirk, I’m not interested in shoving my fingers in the eyes of football fans and calling it entertainment. The Iowa OC hire was pretty funny though.

Here we go. After the 2022 Purdue football season, the Boilermakers lost their head coach: Jeff Brohm. He was a pretty good head coach and a really good offensive coordinator even if he struggled with certain aspects of running a program (like hiring qualified coaches or understanding that defense was a thing).

Ryan Walters, the new and inexperienced head coach, took over. Walters, regrettably, had a demanding schedule for a B1G West squad. Three close non-conference matchups with Michigan and OSU as crossovers. You’ll notice that in order to make up for having to play those two teams and risk losing six games, the lower echelons of the former East division, who suffer yearly brutal beatings at the hands of OSU and Michigan, usually schedule three dog shit non-conference games. That’s life with a nine-game conference schedule when you have a couple of games already decided against you and things are just going to get worse.

Oh sorry, I think I blacked out. Where where we? Oh yes, talking about the mauling of Purdue football in 2023. In addition to getting a truly awful schedule when it comes to trying to build momentum for a 1st year head coach, Purdue had half their roster turn over. Because in the era of NIL payments where players are supposedly paid for their name, image, and likeness on advertising (and totally not just paid by wealthy fans) and the era of the transfer portal (which is definitely not contributing to lower academic results on average), rosters turn over when there is a coaching change. Look, I’m happy the players are getting paid but can we stop saying this is NIL money? Or celebrating the transfer portal? Or pretending that the haves and have nots should be in the same conference for football? There’s a more thought out version of this line of thinking that deserves an article after basketball season ends with another March disappointment but here I am getting side tracked away from the topic at hand again.