Points After: Analysis from Purdue’s loss to Fresno State

Points After is GoldandBlack.com’s traditional post-game, an analytical platform to complement our standard on-site game coverage. Today, Purdue’s 39-35 loss to Fresno State.

For about 29 minutes and 30 seconds on Saturday afternoon, Purdue looked like a clearly better and much luckier team than visiting Fresno State, which had just flubbed a PAT-distance field goal to seemingly send the Boilermakers into the locker room up 21-14. But that’s when some cracks started to show. Purdue just needed a first down. Forget scoring; at that point just getting to the locker room would have been cool.

But Hudson Card was dropped for a no-gainer on first down, and Purdue wound up punting the ball away, setting up Fresno’s 52-yard field goal to wipe its prior miss off the board.

Yeah, Purdue returned the opening kickoff of the second half for six on this all-or-nothing sort of day, but that sequence to end the first half, that was the sign of things to come, a hint at what might lie in store.

The defense, en route to giving up nearly 500 yards, had already shown itself to be highly vulnerable on third down on its way to being downright flammable on third-and-long. That was the game, plain and simple. Purdue could not get off the field when it had put the Bulldog offense in compromising positions. Part of that was a couple of missed tackles, but as big a part was good offense beating decent-enough defense. All day, Mikey Keene and his receivers made tough, contested throws and catches against Purdue’s man coverage. That’s the Russian Roulette of man coverage.

There were some busts, sure, but not giving Keene more than his share of credit would be an injustice to the story of this game. Oh, and that Erik Brooks fellow looked Deion Burks straight in the eye and raised him a big play every time there was one to be matched.

The defense had some moments but in totality just did not get it done today, but also needed help from an offense that couldn’t control the ball starting with that three-and-out late in the first. If Purdue didn’t make a big play, it made no plays from that first half moment on. That was a bit of a surprise after there were some flashes of extended-drive capability in the first half.

This was a problem today. Whether it’s an enduring problem, time will tell. But we’ve seen this movie at Purdue before during the Brohm and Tiller years. It’s hard to be good at everything. And rare at Purdue are the offensive lines — especially when centers are getting hurt every 12 seconds or so — that you can just ride, that can escort you to those 12 inches whenever you need them. When you are philosophically aligned with making big plays — Purdue now may be, may not be, but look at the results today — then the “simple” plays become especially big. The key is self-awareness, knowledge of one’s limitations and an impulse to side-step them. Jeff Brohm would get mad and keep running into walls out of sheer belief that a team should be able to get one yard whenever it wants, even if that team recruited to and dedicated most of its practice time to downfield passing. Like Brohm’s teams, this one looks like it’ll need to pass to run or have some other identity in the run game. Card looked like he could have kept the ball on read options a few times and made some hay. (Walters didn’t give any support to my hunch that they don’t want to use him on designed runs.)

This was the epitome of what I’ve been writing since Ryan Walters was hired: Complementary football. The reality that good offense and good defense are very often tethered to one another. A couple of first downs from the offense after halftime and the defense doesn’t look so bad; a third-and-long stop here or there and maybe the offense gets untracked. Either way, the game is shortened and maybe an 11-point third quarter lead just holds as the game bleeds out.

Here’s the thing, though. This wasn’t going to run like a Porsche from Day 1. None of these dudes had played together before today and that defense Walters built his rep on at Illinois, he and Kevin Kane put two years into helping all those Lovie Smith recruits become NFL draft picks. Offensively, I think you can only have so many injuries on the offensive line and tight end before the ball-control bottom drops out.

Also, Fresno State, whether people wanted to hear it or not beforehand, is good. Give them credit here. You don’t win nine straight to end a season by accident.

Purdue, though, wins this game with just one play here or one play there, and I’m not even talking about scoring plays. Just third downs both ways.

Purdue lost today and that was too bad for the program because otherwise this was a great day. The stadium looks great, by the way. But there was potential shown today. Hudson Card was good. Deion Burks was a star. The defense, for all its failings, showed some creativity and disruptiveness. And when was the last time Purdue had a pulse in the return game? This was a very young staff’s first game. Purdue is playing the long game here, betting on Ryan Walters over the long haul, a haul that only just started today.

Not what you want to hear, and certainly not what Purdue wanted, but it looks to me like it’ll be OK here. History, for whatever it’s worth, tells us that openers sometimes are predictive of things to come but not always.

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