More: Hunte's locker room speech helped change course of season ($)

Nearly a year ago, at Jeff Brohm’s introductory press conference, he said it would be vital how Purdue played the game this season.

He knew there were some talent deficiencies, knew maybe he’d have to adapt his offensive scheme, knew there’d need to be massaging to wounded egos, knew there’d need to be belief instilled in a group that he’d seen give up late the season prior.

So Brohm’s focus was going to be somewhat simple in his first season.

“We’ve got to play hard. We’ve got to play tough. We’ve got to play smart,” he said last December, “and we have to do that every single game better than the other team.

“And if we do that, the fans see it and people recognize it. And whether you win or lose some of those, if you’re doing those three things, they’re like, ‘Man, that team really plays now. They are flying around, they’re having fun doing it.' It can be contagious, so we’re hoping it gets contagious, and we hope everyone buys in and they’re all in.”

Over the course of Brohm’s first season in West Lafayette, he continued to preach those qualities.

He even judged Purdue’s performances on them.

And with Purdue “winning” in all but one game over the course of the 12-game regular season — that 14-12 Rutgers game left Brohm pounding on the podium about how Purdue did not pass any of those tests — it spurred the 6-6 finish and a bowl berth.

At least that’s how Brohm saw it after Purdue’s 31-24 victory over Indiana Saturday.

“I knew we had some challenges ahead of us, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” Brohm said. “I try to be positive. But we did set a goal to go to a bowl game and to win it. That was kind of the main goal we had. Sometimes it didn’t look like it was going to happen, but our guys stuck with it.

“Football is a game where if you coach them up, if you really just focus on a couple simple things while you’re getting better like playing hard, playing tough and playing smart, those three things, if we can try to win that battle, you’ve got a chance to win six games on that alone. Doesn’t matter who’s the coach, in my opinion. So we kind of built it on that. Our guys did a pretty good job I’d say probably every game other than one of winning that battle or at least being right there in the thick of it.”

Perhaps “playing hard” can be tough to gauge because it’s a bit subjective.

But athletic director Mike Bobinski said in mid-October he saw obvious manifestations of Brohm's team playing hard.

Like when defensive players swarm the football, which was a common site even early in the season and produced forced fumbles at such a rapid rate early. It continued to be a trait the defense showed late in the year, too, especially in run defense, when a handful of players would make sure there was nowhere to escape for opposing backs.

But Bobinski saw it in subtle ways, too.

He noticed the body language was better on the sidelines, for one. He didn’t see shoulders sagging or heads dropping when there was adversity in games.

“The vibe on the sideline is different,” he said in October. “People are engaged on the sidelines, they’re engaged. There’s a sense of concentration, focus and attentiveness that wasn’t always there in the past. We might have had it for periods, but we didn’t sustain it. From Day 1, it’s been an every day, every minute focus. In practice, if it’s not where it needs to be, it’s corrected immediately. There’s no tolerance. Our guys have gotten the message.”

Bobinski viewed the ability to bounce back, to consistently compete and fight as evidence of playing hard, too.

And that’s a piece that players took pride in.

Though senior captains Da’Wan Hunte and Danny Ezechukwu said they think playing hard and effort has to come from the player — “Either somebody is going to do it or they’re not,” Ezechukwu said after the IU victory — there has to be a piece of it being able to pulled out of a guy.

Especially when they see it from their teammates.

“We didn’t waver at all,” linebacker Markus Bailey said Saturday. “Even the games that we lost, I had full confidence we were going to win the game coming into the game. And we’ve been in every game. Our biggest loss was 18 points to Michigan, and that’s way different than last year.

“Last year, we got blown out often. We’re better on both sides of the ball overall as a team.”

Part of that improvement, too, was about Brohm’s “smarter” element.

That can show up in a variety of ways.

On game days, “playing smart” means not making mistakes, whether it be missed assignments, turning the ball over or being flagged. By the end of the regular season, Purdue had pretty good metrics there.

The Boilermakers were fifth in the Big Ten in total penalties (70), and their 50.1 yards-per-game average was sixth.

They were fifth in turnover margin (plus-0.25), and they had 16 turnovers for the season. In their run toward bowl eligibility in November — when it won three of four games — Purdue had only three turnovers.

“We knew what was at stake,” Bailey said. “Especially when we got to the point where ‘OK, now, we have to win.’ If we want to go to a bowl, we have to win now. It may have brought a higher sense of urgency to some of the guys on the team. I think it shows. We’ve been playing with a little bit more fire and executing a little bit better.”

Perhaps an overlooked piece of being “smart” is how Brohm approached practices.

Rarely did Purdue have padded practices other than Tuesday, especially in the second half of the season, and, in the final week, it didn’t have any.

“I think they’re player-coaches. They really take care of us as players,” right tackle Dave Steinmetz said earlier this season. “I think we recognize them taking care of us and it makes us want to play even harder for those guys.”

Perhaps the assumption would be practices without pads couldn’t be as physical or as intense. And, to an extent, that may be true: That’s not hitting, obviously, or tackling as much.

But it was how Brohm conducted practices that had players able to build confidence and feel prepared for Saturdays. They felt “smart” because they worked on stopping tendencies of opponents on defense and dissecting defenses’ preferences on offense. And they did it always at game speed.

“That’s the biggest difference with this coaching staff and with our past coaching staffs — everything we do in practice, we do in the game,” senior captain Greg Phillips said early in the season. “It’s pretty amazing. Because we go so hard in practice, we don’t realize we’re going even harder in the game. It’s just second nature. Going hard is expected.”

The toughness element of Brohm’s three-pronged approach is embodied by the head coach, too.

From one of the first spring practices, D.J. Knox said he noticed an intensity and passion in Brohm’s eyes, in his voice, in the way he approached teaching and in the level of expectations he had.

Knox said it's clearly not a fake energy. Brohm is raw and real to his core.

And if the head coach was going to exert so much energy, didn’t the players have to as well?

“It kind of trickles down, just like the waterfall effect,” Knox said. “If the energy comes down from the coach, then it goes into the team leaders, and our team leaders have done a great job of getting the best out of everybody. That’s what we need in order to take this program where we want to go. They’ve done a great job of instilling that discipline and just playing free and being themselves. That’s kind of one thing that’s helped us as a team, we’re able to be loose and be ourselves and have fun with the sport because that’s why we do it.”