Purdue Football Fans, Please Give Brohm A Long Honeymoon

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Do you want the job done fast or do you want it done right? Measure twice, cut once. Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Search the internet for patience and not only will you find the great Guns and Roses song but you’ll also find thousands of quotes about the virtue of patience. It’s something that most of us have in short supply, sports fans especially. I’m among the guilty here as I tend to overreact to losses, blame the leaders of my teams for everything, and demand immediate results. The fact is success doesn’t come easy. Success has to be planned for. Success has to be worked for. Success takes time. So, with that in mind I am proposing a radical plan to help Purdue football. Don’t worry about wins and losses this year (or maybe the year after that).

Yes, I know, as a writer for a sports blog that’s an absurd thing to say, but hear me out. Coach Brohm is coming into a not so great situation. I don’t want to call it a dumpster fire because that is an affront to dumpsters. Purdue football has been so bad these last few years that it will be a Herculean task to rebuilt it. Things like that take time. Brohm deserves to get that time.

Imagine walking into your new job as CEO of a company that has under performed badly in recent years, the stock is plummeting, and to be quite honest the hiring process has not been handled properly. You can’t just fire everyone, I mean you’ve got a company to run after all. So what do you do? You bring in people you trust, you evaluate your talent, you see who can stay and who will need to go. Each time you see an opening to bring in fresh talent you grasp it until over time the bad eggs are gone and you’re left with a workforce shaped in your image. This is the task that Coach Brohm faces.

I think it’s obvious to anyone that watches football that there is a lot of work to be done for Purdue to be competitive let alone win games consistently. With his first spring behind him Coach Brohm has a much better idea of the work that lays ahead of him. He has done as much as he can with this first recruiting class that he inherited by cutting loose a number of commits and seeing some commits walk away all while signing as many JUCO players and grad transfers as he could snatch up. Has he markedly improved the talent on the roster? I have no idea. Football recruiting is tricky because unlike basketball one player isn’t often going to make a huge difference. This Boilermaker team has holes all over the field and Coach Brohm only has so many scholarships to fill them with.

As we march ever closer to the beginning of football season I just beg of the fan base to be patient. Don’t judge Brohm based on this first campaign, or maybe even the second. There’s a foundation that needs to be laid before Purdue can begin to fully rebuild. Like all of you I hope that Brohm is the man for the job but we can’t be sure until he’s given that chance.

In the weeks, months, and years ahead I would imagine there will be more attrition to the roster, more JUCO players, more graduate transfers, and, unhappily, many more losses. The journey ahead for Purdue is going to be long but it starts one scholarship at a time. Until Brohm fills the roster with players that buy into his philosophy and he can truly play to his strengths as an offensive guru it’s hard to judge his ability to turn this ship around.

We all agree that firing Hazell was the right decision. We also all agree that Hazell left Purdue football in worse shape (roster-wise) than when he came in. It took many years to dig this hole that Purdue football finds itself in. The least we can do is allow Brohm a few seasons to fill it in.