Purdue ready to reset, needs to rediscover confidence
More: Purdue-Rutgers coverage
Jeff Brohm likely will find out what his Purdue team is made of this week.
Coming off a 14-12 loss to Rutgers in a game they were favored, the Boilermakers may have lost the confidence they'd built up for a strong start. Brohm and his staff will work this week to regain that, he said Monday.
But first, they had to face reality on Sunday.
That’s when the team gathers to go over the previous day’s game and correct mistakes. There were more than coaches would have liked Sunday, but the message was clear, as always.
“Sometimes when things aren’t going your way, you’ve got to find a way to speak the truth but in a positive tone. I think our guys understood that,” Brohm said, “and they realize where we made mistakes and they realize that due to a few mistakes happening early, the confidence was shot and the energy and enthusiasm was not there. We can’t be that team. We won’t win that way.
“We’ve got to get back up. I think we’ve got to help them get back up. We’ve got to go to work. You’ve got to adjust and try to do your part to get better, and I think our guys will have a good week of practice. Really, we’ve just got to show up on game day ready to go and understand what all it’s going to take in order to win and hopefully they will do that on Saturday.”
The Boilermakers have adversity, in a sense, at points this season already. They’ve been without key pieces to its defense, whether it be injury (T.J. McCollum, for one) or the first-half absence of Ja’Whaun Bentley and Jacob Thieneman against Minnesota because of targeting calls. They’ve had four turnovers in one half. They’ve had to overcome late-game deficits. They’ve battled through significant talent limitations on offense.
But, now, they’re faced with more than an in-game adjustment.
They’re going to have to prove they’re truly turned the page. Have to prove they have embraced the Brohm Era-way of thinking and not fallen back into bad woe-is-me habits when there is real struggle. When they lose a game they shouldn’t have, a game they were expected to win.
Did a loss to Rutgers ding the confidence so much the belief has evaporated?
Brohm will find out this week.
“I’m looking forward to seeing how they respond,” he said. “In our conference, when you get into conference play, anybody can win on a given day. We’re going to face teams that if we do our part and play well, we’ll have a chance to win. If we don’t do the small things, we won’t. We’ve won one Big Ten game, and we had to scratch and claw to get that, and that’s how we’re going to have to do to get any win we want to get. If our guys just understand that, play tough and hang in there until the end, you hope that good things are happening. But as soon as the confidence level is shot and you start to doubt some things, it’s going to be hard.”
Other than preseason goal-setting, Brohm hasn’t mentioned anything about bowl eligibility. He’s been firm on adopting the mindset of a one-game season, perhaps in part because he didn’t know if this team could handle anything more. It’d had a history of roller-coaster emotions, too high after victories, too low after defeats. Brohm worked to stabilize that and, for the most part, had seemed to do so over the season’s first six games. His challenge now is to get the team refocused for the final five, and if he can, there’s still a chance to reach that preseason goal that no one is talking about.
“We’ve got to find a way to win this football game and find a way to get better,” Brohm said. “Right now, we’ve had two losses in a row. After the last game, I’m sure some of our players’ confidence was shot a little bit. We’ve got to get that back up and really get back to where we were at before we took the field the first game and that is believing you can get it done when you take the field.
“We’ve got to make sure we all believe we’re the best at what we do when we take the field and we’ve got to work through anything that happens in the game, and we’ve got to keep firing bullets. The mindset has to get back to being very confident every time we step on the game field.”
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