“This is football. The beat goes on…Suck it up.” — Purdue coach Joe Tiller after a fifth straight defeat.
It’s hard to imagine Tiller’s “victory lap” as Purdue head coach going much worse. At least, that’s what I thought before this weekend. Then, starting quarterback Curtis Painter got knocked out of Saturday’s game against Minnesota with a shoulder injury. The result was yet another disappointing Boilermaker offensive performance, as Purdue finished on the short end of this week’s “Diamond in the Rough” game.
COACF was live in the West Lafayette press box to bring you all the details…
1. DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH: No. 24 MINNESOTA 17, PURDUE 6
Minnesota coach Tim Brewster has come a long way since the last time he coached in West Lafayette twenty years ago. For that matter, Brewster and his program have come a long way since 2007.
Winless in the Big Ten a season ago, the surprising Golden Gophers improved to 7-1 by spoiling Purdue’s homecoming on Saturday with a hard-fought 17-6 win.
It wasn’t just Purdue’s homecoming, however. Brewster was celebrating a return to the scene of his first coaching job; he was a Boilermaker graduate assistant in 1986, and coached high school football in Lafayette the next two years before moving on to bigger things.
His team may not have a lot of talent—in fact, I think Minnesota may be the worst top-25 team I’ve ever seen. But what the Gophers lack in talent, they make up in heart, and in the end, that was enough for Minnesota to escape with what their coach termed a “gutsy, hard-fought victory.”
With the win, Minnesota continues its journey from 2007 bottom-feeder to 2008 bowl-contender. Heading the opposite direction: Joe Tiller’s Purdue Boilermakers.
Already the winningest coach in Purdue history with 10 bowl trips in 11 seasons, Tiller’s team dropped its fifth straight decision to fall to 2-6 and make an 11th bowl trip a near impossibility as the veteran mentor prepares to retire.
The biggest story in the game was Curtis Painter’s first-quarter shoulder injury. He was replaced by redshirt freshman Justin Siller (think a poor man’s Terrelle Pryor), a dual-threat quarterback who had been moved to running back in preseason practice.
After backup QB Joey Elliott suffered a season-ending separated shoulder last week, Siller was informed that he was now a quarterback again.
As anyone who is familiar with Murphy’s Law would expect, it only took a few minutes into Siller’s first weekend as a clipboard-holding quarterback before he was pressed into duty.
Painter briefly returned and tried to gut it out in the second quarter, but he was not able to go at all in the second half. Siller and star running back Kory Sheets each had a couple nifty runs in the contest, but Purdue lives and dies with its spread passing attack, and 109 total yards through the air falls into the “dying” category.
No one knew it at the time, but this game was actually over less than two minutes after it began. On the opening drive, Gopher quarterback Adam Weber hooked up with Brandon Green for a 71-yard completion to set up the game’s first touchdown, and the seven points was more than Purdue could muster in an entire afternoon.
Although it may have been a happy homecoming for Tim Brewster…
…it was anything but for the Old Gold and Black.
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