More ($): Superlatives, predictions and more
The question was posed to Jeff Brohm at Big Ten media day in Chicago many weeks ago: "Did you win too much too quickly?" or something of the sort.
Counterintuitive as it may sound, the man had a point.
The Boilermakers' 7-6 season of 2018 by most standards would qualify as good, not great. At some places, a winning percentage of 54 percent would stand as mediocrity. At some other places, 7-6 costs people their jobs.
At Purdue, it was the Greatest 7-6 Season Ever.
Following years of football prior to Brohm's hiring that peaked at uninteresting and inconsistent and bottomed out at simply dreadful, the Boilermakers were reborn in 2017, one of college football's great success stories.
It wasn't the 7-6 record by itself that tells the story; it's the story of it.
Purdue was energized from the outset, competitive against Louisville in Indy, the first half of which set a stone for the season, by the sound of it, by providing a success-starved roster urgently needed doses of both belief and validation. Purdue lost that battle, but won the war, so to speak, as it led to an impressive win over Ohio in one of the great nights Ross-Ade Stadium has known in some time, and then a stunning obliteration of Missouri, at Missouri.
As a difficult as it might have been to imagine at the time, Purdue's eye-opening start to the season could be topped, and was.
After a midseason lull — a crushing last-second loss to Nebraska and maddening loss at awful Rutgers gave the look of reality cruelly setting in, of Cinderella turning back into the maid — Purdue suddenly reversed its fortunes again, and closed the season even stronger than it started, handling Iowa at Iowa, crushing rival Indiana in a bowl-elimination Hunger Games, then rallying late in the fourth quarter to win a wild one over Arizona in the Foster Farms Bowl.
In those three wins, it was Purdue's offense — led by a quarterback missing a particularly important knee ligament, or at least a structurally sound one — that led, morphed seemingly overnight into the sort its offensive-minded head coach was hired to craft.
To finish a winning season that wouldn't have been even remotely possible had Purdue's long-downtrodden defense not transformed under Nick Holt and his defensive staff's direction, the Boilermaker offense averaged 434 yards and 31 points over its final 12 quarters of football.
It was the passing game, what Brohm's known for.
To close the season, Anthony Mahoungou caught 15 of ACL-less quarterback Elijah Sindelar's passes, for an average gain of 22.7 yards. The five catches that went for touchdowns spanned an average of 35.2, capped by his 38-yard game-winner in San Francisco.
It was Sindelar-to-Mahoungou (and in the bowl game, Gregory Phillips) that made Purdue's season when its season hit the ropes, but also simply a fitting finish to a year in which Brohm, his coaches and a roster clearly tired of being kicked around sort of redefined possible.
After years of that numbing football that drove fans off almost as much as the losing, Purdue was one of the most interesting teams in college football in 2017, its football thinking constrained by no boundary. Flea flickers were so common Purdue could actually effectively fake them, long-snappers ran post routes, kneel-downs weren't kneel-downs and in general, the Boilermakers left Big Ten football fields littered with kitchen sinks, win or lose.
In context, it was a surreal season.
But now, a tough act to follow.
Make no mistake here: Purdue is no finished product, and with a schedule that stiffens considerably over last year's — at least on paper — the possibility certainly exists that the second edition of Purdue football under Jeff Brohm could be stronger in its roots than the first, but yield less fruit.
That is, win fewer games.
And so much is at stake.
Momentum.
Purdue's upward surge from this time a year ago 'til now has re-engaged a wayward fanbase, attached a revenue IV to a dehydrated operation and turbo-charged recruiting to the point the future looks more promising than the promising present.
But momentum is a funny thing.
You fight like hell to get it, then you have to fight like hell to keep it, like a foul ball in a crowd full of drunks.
Purdue has a fight on its hands this season, for certain. And its momentum hangs in the balance, and even the look of regression amounts to regression in a world driven by the fickle natures of fans and teenage recruits. In that sense, seven wins is a hell of a lot of wins.
Two-thirds of the non-conference schedule is of the P5 variety. Ohio State and Michigan State are back on the schedule, though Michigan is not. There's no Rutgers or coach-less Maryland. The teams Purdue beat at home last season — Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana — those games move to the road now. And the Boilermakers are the guest of honor for Scott Frost's Big Ten home debut at Nebraska, what should be a momentous event in Lincoln, for a program that should be better and probably now will be.
It starts Thursday with Northwestern, a model for the sort of program Purdue hopes it's moving toward being.
Brohm has pulled no punches in punctuating the importance of a game that could take his program's inertia from one level to another and set a tone for a season in which wins could be that much harder to come by.
But Purdue has reasons for optimism following last season's success, but also an urgent need to process that success as a step, not an arrival. The Boilermakers won on effort and scheme as much or more than ability in 2017.
But it also faces headwinds. The schedule, being one. Significant personnel turnover from last season's inspired defense being another. A bizarre inability to keep running backs healthy being yet another. And so on.
But that's college football. Things change every year. What we know in September and what we know in December are two wholly different things, as evidenced by the four-alarm question of, "Who's going to replace Anthony Mahoungou?" (What an incredible story that was.)
Last season, everything changed for Purdue.
This year, the goal is for that change to stick, to continue feeding that precious, but potentially fleeting, momentum.
