Purdue Baseball Adds Greg Goff as Assistant

After going 29-27 in Mark Wasikowski’s first season as head coach Purdue baseball is finally on an upswing. Much of the team will return in 2018, and they now have a new assistant coach in Greg Goff, the former head coach at Alabama:

With 14 seasons of head coaching experience and 10 more as an assistant coach, Goff becomes one of the most veteran assistant coaches in the Big Ten. He has won over 450 games as a head coach. He served as the pitching coach at Kentucky (2000-03) along with stints as an assistant at SEMO (1998-99) and his alma mater Delta State (1994-97).

As a head coach, Goff's teams won over 40 games six times. Campbell was one of only eight Division I programs to win 40-plus games for three straight years from 2012 to 2014, posting 131 total victories during that span. He also won 42 games in his final season at Louisiana Tech.

Goff has a close friendship with Wasikowski from previous coaching stops for both. This past season Alabama was 19-34-1, but Goff was fired after one season. Previously he was at Louisiana Tech, where he was 42-20 in 2016. His firing was a bit controversial, however:

Byrne didn't hire Greg Goff as Alabama's head baseball coach a year ago, but he didn't hesitate to fire him Wednesday. It was the best thing to happen to Alabama baseball in some time, according to people close to the program, because Goff was the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.

It wasn't just losing at a rate Alabama hadn't suffered since 1980. It was the way Goff related to his players. Or didn't relate to them.

It was threatening to withhold their meal money. It was threatening to take away their scholarship money. It was letting them know that they simply weren't worth a darn, to put it more politely than he did, and letting everyone know he couldn't wait to bring in his own players.

Those were only behind-the-scenes allegations, but they were still enough to see him gone from Alabama after only one year. Here is what Goff had to say to Nathan Baird of the Journal & Courier:

Goff said Thursday the allegation "was not true at all."

"I want to make sure everyone understands I'm not some disgruntled employee," Goff said. "I loved my year here. There was a transition of a new AD and that stuff. I want to stay positive with everything."

Wasikowski said he looked into the allegations himself and was satisfied no violations occurred.

This is a good move overall for Purdue. Officially, Goff will be an unpaid volunteer coach, but he is owed the remainder of his 5-year contract at Alabama at $265,000 per year, so that helps.