Things are starting to get interesting as I can now officially say the season begins next month. I’m starting to get more and more antsy as I wait for my tickets to come in the mail. Since there is always the chance I’ll be moving to Florida, I never know if this will be my last season viewing the Boilers from section 128. In a related note to that, I recently found out I will be viewing the first two home games from the Shively Stadium Club, so if anyone is interested in my seats feel free to e-mail me and maybe we can work a deal.I think I kind of spoiled things earlier this week by letting a few things out early for Boilermakings, but there are still plenty of notes to touch on.
The best Purdue story of the year
This story has nothing to with the resurgence of the basketball program, or the upcoming football season. This past May tight end Kyle Adams, did something very productive with his down time after classes ended. Instead of heading out on vacation, he took a trip to Haiti as part of a mission through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. While there, he took part in building a house for a very poor single mother of four children.
Everday Should be Saturday has a running feature called the Fulmer Cup, which keeps track of offseason brushes with the law for Division 1-A college football players. Purdue has been part of it this summer thanks to Torri Williams, but it is unfortunate that there isn’t a similar scoreboard for athletes like Kyle. Purdue is very lucky to have representatives like Kyle Adams.
By the way, if you’re interested in more information about the Double Harvest mission, it can be found here.
Men’s basketball gets ready to head Down Under
It’s not quite Beijing as part of Dream Team V, but the Purdue men’s basketball team is on the mend and is getting ready to head to Australia for their international summer tour. Keaton Grant won’t be heading down under with the team, but he is supposed to still be recovering well from his knee surgery. I found Chris Kramer noticeably absent from this article as well. I do like that a big man like Chris Reid will get some minutes. If he can even give us 5 productive minutes per game in the season it will be a bonus.
I also found the discussion of our non-conference schedule to be quite interesting. It is sure to be much more difficult than the past couple of seasons, but that will only help when it comes to NCAA Tournament seeding. We already know that Duke, Davidson, and the troika of Boston College, Arizona, and Oklahoma are likely to await in the preseason NIT final four. Playing Georgia would make for a difficult road in that tournament, but not impossible. Once the schedule is officially released I am sure I’ll have more to say, as I plan to interject more basketball in with football during the season.
Curtispainter12.com goes live
My friends over at Boiled Sports touched on this earlier this week, but Curtis Painter officially has the first Heisman promotion site up for the coming season. It is good to see the university get behind Curtis like they did with Brees and Orton. They even had a good warm up in the mid-90’s during Mike Alstott’s under the radar Heisman campaign. I must say I agree with Boilerdowd’s assessment of the site. It could certainly use some work.
As far as my thought on Curtis wining the Heisman, they are as follows. We will need to win a minimum of 10 games and compete for a Big Ten championship for him to wint he thing. I am confident he will have a good year. I am even confident he can have a great year as the receivers grow with him. My wide receivers preview will go live on Monday, but in it I think we have enough pieces to keep the offense moving. What is in common with nearly every Heisman winner is that he wins games. If Drew Brees can’t win it over a former baseball player that was greatly older than everyone else on the field and a guy that had one good statistical season for that year’s national champion, the Painter will have a difficult road unless he can at least repeat Drew’s feat of taking Purdue to Pasadena.
Still, it is a light year for quarterbacks. If he has a great year and Purdue reaches 9-10 wins with some upsets along the way you never know.
MGoblog piles onto the preview wagon.
Across the Big Ten blogging feed today came Brian Cook of MGoBlog fame’s preview of Purdue. I can’t blame for his slightly negative view of the Boilers. Like most everyone else in the country knows, we haven’t exactly set the world afire lately. Sure we "changed the Big Ten" by bringing the forward pass to in 1997, but since then we have fallen back to the level of, "not bad, but not great either." Beginning in 2005 the national pundits predicted greatness, but we have far from lived up tot hose expectations. As a result, people are tired of waiting for us.
Brian seems to think eight wins is the ceiling for the year. I am somewhat more optimistic in thinking 10 is possible if everything goes perfectly. I do agree that things could go badly in a hurry. He also seems to think 2009 will be awful, but I don’t want to think about that yet.
In reality, it is a very good, in depth preview. That’s probably why Brian gets to do this for a living and I have to scramble to find time to do this site. I hope we prove him wrong, like so many others.
Off the Tracks goes national, world domination next
This final part of the entry is tooting my own horn a bit, but as a former trombone player I am used to that. This week has been very good to me, as I have been published not once, but twice nationally.
The first was something that has been in the works for awhile. I merely needed to wait for the pages of the calendar to turn. I received in the mail my complimentary copy of Light From the Word, a Christian daily devotional published by Wesley Bible Resources. Featured in it is none other than yours truly.This handy devotional is found in churches all over the country, if not the world. The small section I wrote is the daily reading from Monday, September 15th to Sunday, September 21st. There's also an incredibly brief bio in the back. The other writers have been doing this for awhile, and they're pretty good, so I hope my first effort draws a fair comparison. Feel free to pick up a copy anywhere or read it online at http://www.wesleybible.com/.
The second was more of a surprise, as College Football News picked up my Game Day Guide to West Lafayette article. This is something I became interested in earlier this year, but it the first time I have submitted an article tot heir new blogging feature. The bulk of my content will still be appearing here, but I will likely select and article from time to time to publish over there as well in order to draw more traffic to this site. This is mostly done because building a successful blog isn’t done without becoming a whore to self-promotion.
I do want to take this time, once again, to thank all my readers. When I started this site almost two years ago I had no idea it would become even as large as it is today. Now even more growth appears to be on the horizon, and this has become something I am very proud of. I wouldn’t be here without you guys, so thanks for stopping by. I’ll keep writing if you keep reading.