Purdue Football: Life in a Welfare State - More from Doug Griffiths

If you don’t follow Doug Griffiths (@PilotNewsDoug) on Twitter, you need to be this week. Doug is the former editor of Gold & Black Illustrated, so he has been privy to a lot of Purdue sports history in the last 20 years or so. He saw the rise of Joe Tiller firsthand and has long been an ardent Purdue supporter. this week he saw our piece from a former player and finally decided that enough was enough.

Doug’s position with GBI gave him unprecedented access to the athletic department. He was behind the scenes nearly every day and saw the treatment that coaches and players received from the administration. that access gives his tweets, which have been numerous over the last three days, a certain degree of truth. I have no reason to doubt much of what he says because we have heard rumors about them for years.

We shared some of Doug’s tweets earlier this week, but here are more from the last two days:

We are in a sad, dark place, my friends, and it is not going to get any better until said drastic changes are made. I have been around Purdue for more than 25 years now and I have seen that it is, indeed, an institutional mindset. Large parts of Ross-Ade Stadium look exactly the same as they did when I went to my first game in 1997. the Purdue Football Master plan absolutely needs to happen just to have a chance at being competitive, and we’re likely 4-5 years out at best from seeing it happen.

The thing is, I can see absolutely nothing changing from this. I am as ardent of a supporter as there is. I still get my season tickets and I am even going to Illinois this weekend. I am also in John Purdue club, giving what I can afford each year. If I pull all that it won’t change anything. The only people with the power to change it are the trustees and the President. I fear all of the protests and gnashing of teeth this week will fall on deaf ears. they are set in their ways with their attitudes and that is that. I fear no argument will change their minds.

That is why I have not emailed either personally. I expect the boilerplate “We’re trying! look at all these reasons” letter that is typical, but we’re not going to get the stark admission of mistakes that have been made. We’re probably lucky to get said boilerplate reply, and that is just sad. Perhaps an avalanche of emails and letters will change things, especially if they comes with threats to withdraw financial support, but I don’t there will be real change. Purdue gets its welfare check from the Big Ten every year and the university as a whole has been happy for decades with barely competing in most sports (remember, it took 103 years to win a second baseball Big Ten title). We can have a $2 billion fundraising general campaign for the university, like they currently are having, but don’t dare have a penny of that money going toward athletics. in fact, the school still takes some of that Big Ten welfare check each year.

The President likes to say we’re not going to get into an athletics arms race, by by virtue of being in the Big Ten we ARE in an arms race whether we like it or not.

I don’t want to leave John Purdue Club because I know that money goes to scholarships for the kids playing. It is not their fault. Why should my anger with the President and board enforcing the status quo deprive some kid of a scholarship to get an education?

So I guess we move forward. We’re thankful with the Mackey renovation and practice facility that in basketball, at least, there is a commitment. We have replaced Indiana in that we suffer football to support basketball.