Three Thoughts is a new feature GoldandBlack.com will run every Monday morning in-season.

Purdue's remarkable win over Tennessee at Music City Bowl — the term "short-handed" doesn't do justice to the personnel predicament that team faced — was the sort of thing you can build a program around.

The term "next man up" has been thrown around so much it's become just empty press-conference jargon, drained by over-use of all its meaning, if it ever had any to begin with. But whatever that term is supposed to mean, what you saw in Nashville, that was it. The identity Purdue took on that day, that was it.