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Jeff Brohm probably will have some kind of script.
Before his first game as Purdue’s head coach Saturday, when the Boilermakers play No. 16 Louisville, the school Brohm quarterbacked, Brohm will closely watch his players in pregame warm-ups to get a pulse.
Then, in the locker room before they take the field, he’ll launch into a speech. It’ll probably be fiery. It’ll probably hit key points that he scripted. But it’ll also probably be partly off-the-cuff, the coach just spouting whatever comes his mind that could serve to get the team’s mindset right for its biggest game of the season.
Because it’s the first game of the season.
While at Louisville as a player and later as an assistant coach at Florida Atlantic, Brohm learned from mastermind Howard Schnellenberger about how to motivate players, how to instill belief.
It’s a work in progress at Purdue, a program that has won only nine times in the past four seasons, but it’s an important piece to building a foundation, and, ultimately, a program that wins consistently again, Brohm said.
“I think as a coach, you have to make sure that your players believe in you and you have to make sure you get your players to believe they can conquer anything and take on any challenge and find a way to get it done. You, really, you can,” Brohm said Monday in his first weekly press conference of the season. “While it is a little bit of talk, really, you can. I think the mindset in our guys, they’ve got to start to believe they can find a way to win. Sometimes, it doesn’t just happen automatically. People aren’t just going to roll over in the second quarter and the game is over. It’s got to be a constant competitive fire and want to fight the entire game, regardless of the score, fight ’til the end. Whether you see a change in the first game, the second, the fifth, the seventh, I don’t know. But it has to be a constant thing that your players, all of them on the team, have that in them and that they’re willing to fight regardless of who they’re going against and what the score is.
“It’s easier said than done. I think that we have made tremendous strides in practice. In scrimmage settings, we’ve made some strides, not as much as I would like. But that’s all part of it.”
Purdue is a significant underdog Saturday — the line was at 26.5 points Monday afternoon — and that’ll likely be the case to some degree for the entirety of the season. So Brohm knows he’ll need to keep plugging and encouraging and pushing players to get their minds right.
Before his former team, Western Kentucky, geared up to play top-ranked Alabama, Brohm spit and screamed his way through an impassioned pregame speech that implored the Hilltoppers to make the game a “street fight between the whistles.” On Monday, he said that obviously “didn’t work very well” because his team “got beat pretty good” in 2016. (The final was 38-10, though WKU trailed only 10-3 after the first quarter.)
Though a strong effort, Brohm probably won’t ever be as bold as his mentor, Schnellenberger.
Brohm has called some of Schnellenberger’s statements outlandish, and the top of the list is probably when Schnellenberger declared Louisville on a “collision course with the national championship. The only variable is time.”
That was at his introductory press conference. The Cardinals didn’t have a winning season in his first three seasons, though Season 4 produced a breakout 10-1-1 season with a victory over Alabama in the Fiesta Bowl.
Brohm joked Monday he won’t be making any championship pronouncements, but it’s likely he will serve up something special.
“Every player is a different mentality. But when it comes game time, they have to have the same mentality and it has to be an attacking, aggressive mentality that you’re going to fight til the very end to get it done,” Brohm said. “You try to bring that in your players. Sometimes, in pregame warmups, you can kind of see and feel how it’s going and other times, (you think) ‘This thing needs to be cranked up. People need to really start to realize what it’s going to take in order to play this game at a high level.’ Sometimes it’s a feel thing.
“The first game, it shouldn’t be hard to motivate your guys to play hard. They should be looking forward to it. There’s no reason when young men at this age put in work year-round — they’re dedicated to their craft, they try to improve — that when you take the game (field), you’re (not) now ready to play. We talk all the time about getting better and improving every day, but in the end, there are certain days you have to take the test. When you take the test, you’ve got to show up and you’ve got to try to dominate the test. You can’t just think because you practice well, it’s going to happen. No. You’ve got to continue to try to dominate the test. This is going to be a great test, Game 1.”
Belief, though, isn’t necessarily only a feeling.
Brohm knows the more prepared his team is, the more it’ll be confident. He and his staff have been watching Louisville film all summer, preparing a game plan that likely will be defined by its risk taking.
That, too, is part of what Schnellenberger instilled.
“You can’t play not to lose. You have to play to win,” Brohm said Monday. “I think we’re going to try to play to win every snap.”
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