Three Thoughts From The Weekend: Purdue-Fresno State, injury reports and more
GoldandBlack.com’s Three Thoughts from the Weekend column runs every Monday morning, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting or whatever else comes to mind. In this week’s edition, we discuss Kickoff 2023 for Purdue injury reports and more.
ON PURDUE VS FRESNO STATE
I think Purdue will win its opener Saturday vs. Fresno State on Saturday, but if you ask me why, I’m not sure I could give you a great answer. Just giving the benefit of the doubt to the Big Ten, the home field and the best player on that field, Hudson Card.
Mind you, the Bulldogs won nine straight to end last season, led by as experienced a coach as Purdue will see all season, with an NFL defensive coordinator and a roster loaded with California speed and athleticism. Take this one for granted at your own peril.
Yes, Fresno is playing three time zones away — last time the Bulldogs traveled further east than New Mexico — they lost at Connecticut, which is, it turns out, possible. Who knew?
The bigger issue, I’d think: Fresno State will play its season opener at 9 a.m. Cali time. No idea if they’ve been practicing in the morning or not, but that might be the bigger deal than the flight. Is there room in Purdue’s visiting locker room for a Starbucks kiosk?
Now, if the cross-country trip both ways is going to be such a competitive deadlift, then the Next Big Ten is going to be complete and utter chaos and the Picked-4 of USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon might be, well, screwed any time they exit In ‘N Out Country.
No, I expect Purdue to win this game, but for no better reason than what we always apply when Big Ten teams host G5 opponents. But this is the ultimate “no over-reactions” opener for Purdue.
Things are very different at Purdue than they were just nine months ago. The only real similarity I see between Jeff Brohm and Ryan Walters is that they had the same office and have lived in the same house (not at the same time). For those returning, this is very new. New can be great. New can also take a minute.
Speaking of new, this is really Purdue’s first foray into mass-transfer — yeah I know that sounds like a subway stop — life. One undeniable reality of this era of unpredictability all over college football is that there might be some horrendous football played in Week 1.
Saturday, such dynamics go both ways. Fresno has transfers, too, including its quarterback. There won’t be a ton of games played this season in which at least one team isn’t playing a transfer quarterback. Experience at the position now means the guy transferred in last year, like Caleb Williams.
Yeah, I expect Purdue to win Saturday. If it does, we’ll see what happens from there. If it doesn’t, well, we’ll see what happens from there.
ON A GAPING VOID
I don’t know anything about Austin Johnson and his potential at center, but I do know Purdue is way worse off because of the void he’s filling. Gus Hartwig, for as long as he remains sidelined by last season’s knee injury, will be missed, though in this staff’s case, how do you miss what you never had?
Brutal timing on that injury last year, as it bleeds into his senior season. I think Hartwig has NFL potential and this affects his trajectory. It also killed the kid’s options coming out of last season. Not saying that Hartwig might have followed classmates Spencer Holstege and Eric Miller out the door before or after the coaching change, but he’d have had 30 offers waiting for him had he done so and never even had to make that decision.
Purdue could use all the experience it can get on an offensive line breaking in a bunch of transfers, same as so many other positions, not to mention a couple of younger returnees moving up the ranks. I bring this up because Hartwig was just voted a captain, as should have been expected, and as Purdue embarks on this new season, it would be nice to have its most influential leaders on the field, obviously.
Further, Hudson Card is both the present and future of this program. Some continuity at center would have been just lovely, but if Purdue has to change things on the fly during the season, that’s a reset where you’d rather just let things keep playing normally.
ON INJURY REPORTS
You might remember that humorous moment a few years back when Jeff Brohm was doing a pre-game interview on the field at Illinois, saying that he didn’t know yet whether Rondale Moore would be playing that day, while behind him, Moore was catching balls, if I recall his exact activity correctly.
Now, in Brohm’s defense, those decisions — with that particular player especially — weren’t his to make. And it’s far from uncommon for a banged-up player to “give it a go” in warmups, then make a call thereafter.
But it was a perfect encapsulation of the absurdity of the cat-and-mouse game played over injuries. Coaches hate when media ask about them, as if we get our jollies from harping on the status of Joey’s hamstring, knowing there’s a 75-percent chance (give or take) we will get at best a non-answer, at worst a lie. But we have to ask. There’s no more relevant “news” each week than who’s going to, you know, play.
But those coaches know that Team A is scouring the Internet for every shred of information available. They know because they’re doing the exact same.
Anyway …
As my colleague, Tom, reported, Purdue is going to start issuing NFL-ish injury reports every Thursday. Why? I’m sure that will be explained at some point, but the NFL does it for gamblers. Brohm, an NFL guy himself, seemed to favor this, but my guess is that was at least in part because those Monday-and-Thursday media sessions were becoming tiresome.
Now, if this becomes more of a thing in college football, what becomes of the silly gamesmanship coaches have come to adopt as S.O.P. The whole, “We know who our quarterback is, but we’re not going to tell you” stuff, only with injuries involved.
Now, must we come to parse the infinite scope of the term “questionable?” Why not list every player on the roster as such? You control the information, like when some coaches over the years listed all their linemen at 300 pounds, or that one year when Joe Tiller hilariously put them all at 299, as if Ohio State wouldn’t notice on tape that Kelly Butler was like 340.
We can all expect Purdue to handle this in good faith, I’d hope, but if this gets normalized, I’ll tell you that if there’s anything coaches enjoy more than winning and signing $40-million contracts, it’s this: Loopholes. Unless Power Football — the Big Ten and SEC — decide to make this a blanket practice, there would presumably be no ramifications for creative injury reports. The NFL fines you. Are we to believe Jim Harbaugh, during Ohio State week, would willingly just offer up the name of a sidelined player that no one knew about without some sort of accountability requirement? Are we sure Lane Kiffin — our go-to guy if college football requires some sort of stupid and futile gesture handled — listing his left tackle out (bad case of Montezuma’s Revenge, perhaps), then running the kid out there against Auburn and crediting a miracle of modern medicine or the work of a higher power (not Greg Sankey).
I don’t know if Purdue is doing this as a measure of protection against the gambling element, a perpetual threat that has certainly been present more than we’ve ever known, but is now more of a threat than ever. I can put $5 on the Yankees losing tonight — free money, these days — while stopped at a red light, you know. You could lay down a hundred times that just as easily should you find out proprietary info about Joey’s hamstring, which Coach described on Tuesday as “getting better every day, but we’ll see how he feels 11 seconds after my last media availability this week.”
Or maybe Purdue just senses the tide flowing in this direction anyway. Maybe it prefers media sessions better feature its charismatic new coach’s personality instead of bogging it down with spoken agate.
This is a very different approach Purdue is taking. If it becomes an approach everyone else starts taking, the games within the games really change.
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