Purdue Football Recruiting: Mylan Graham to Ohio State.

Purdue’s new coaching staff went trophy fishing and came back to shore an empty boat. The highest rated player in Indiana, 5* New Haven wide receiver Mylan Graham committed to an Ohio State University (Columbus campus).

Purdue turned new wide receiver coach / ace recruiter Cory Patterson loose on this one, and the Boilermakers went from “excuse me, who are you?” to “making the commitment tweet as an also-ran.” That’s impressive.

There are no consolation prizes in recruiting, and realistically, Purdue went from having a 0% chance to having like a 2.5% chance of landing Graham, but that’s more a function of the previous staff. It would have been interesting to see Coach Walters, Harrell, and Paterson have more time to work on him, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Why Write This Article?

First off, it’s big in-state recruiting news.

More importantly, I want to point out that the current staff is coming into this recruiting class significantly behind. Indiana is a tough state to recruit. You’ve got blue bloods to the east and north and Notre Dame lurking in-state.

At some point, Coach Walters will need to find a way to crack into the elite talent in Indiana, but it won’t be this year. The top 2 in-state players, Graham and New Palestine OL Ian Moore, are both committed to the Buckeyes. The 3rd and 4th rated players in Indiana, Fort Wayne athlete Brauntae Johnson and Sytles Prescod are both considered Notre Dame leans.

Purdue needs to land an occasional elite in-state talent, and that will be one of the first measuring sticks for Coach Walters. I think he’ll be an elite recruiter, but the proof is in the recruiting. While he’s gearing up to start keeping players home (I do not acknowledge Notre Dame as an Indiana school. They are a New Jersey school squatting in northern Indiana), he’ll need to use his mid-west connections to make up ground. I expect Purdue to look west for the first time in a while and make a push into Illinois and Missouri. The staff also has Texas ties, which started to pay off last year with Coach Hagen. It would be nice to keep that pipeline open as well.

All-in-all, missing out on Graham was expected. Hopefully in the near future we’ll be more bummed out about losing high level Indiana kids to Ohio State.