Big Ten Football: What a Bowl Win Would Mean for Purdue (and a Loss Too)

There are few places quite like Detroit in December.  At least, few places that people will venture to watch an exhibition football game.

It's cold in Detroit, but not so cold that you can't go outside without gloves or a hat or risk frostbite.  It's too far east for that; too beholden to the docile influence of Lake Michigan on things west of the "lake-effect snow" belt. Still, it's cold enough.

There isn't much snow either.  That's the misconception of Michigan in the early winter; that December is accompanied by a blanket of snow that will stay until March.  Snow comes and goes and never really gets serious until January either before or after a quick thaw that reminds residents just how pleasant things can get before plunging them into the worst of it.  

All in all, December in Detroit is just a constant chill of the cold wind over dead grasses and leafless trees.  Bleak.  It's exceptionally bleak.

For the Purdue Boilermakers, it's somewhat of a familiar bleakness.  Not only was Purdue's last bowl trip to Detroit—in 2007 for the then-named Motor City bowl which switched its corporate interest to pizza after the auto industry collapsed a year later—but the last few seasons of Purdue football have had a similar feeling: barren, cold, unforgiving.

The end of the Joe Tiller era could not have gone much worse: a 4-8 season that was far from the back-to-back nine win affairs which Tiller had led the team to in his first two years as head coach. Bringing Danny Hope in from a job at Eastern Kentucky to be an assistant coach and the team's successor was supposed to ease the transition, but the script changed, and here Purdue is, four years later, just finally clawing itself out of the wilderness.  Two losing seasons finally broke through to .500.

Danny Hope's tenure as head coach has been wild enough that it just covers up how mediocre his team has been most of that time.  There is, first of all, his 2-1 record against Ohio State combined with Purdue's first win over Michigan in the Big House since the mid-60s.

Throw in upsets of ranked teams (Northwestern '10, Illinois '11—back when that still meant something), and a near upset of Oregon in 2009.  But then there are the five and four-win seasons, respectively, in 2009 and 2010.  There was the incredibly unlucky rash of injuries last year that pushed back any hope at the "breakthrough" that Purdue fans had been clamoring for since Tiller had left.

This year was more of the same.  Wins over Ohio State and Illinois clouded a loss to Rice and three blowouts at the hands of Michigan, Notre Dame and Wisconsin.  All of it added together was enough, however, to put the Boilermakers back into the postseason.

And so Purdue finds itself in Detroit, a city that can stand in as a pretty effective tableau of wanting-to-get-back-to-where-it-once-was that so completely controls the desire of what few football fans Purdue has left.  This team was never as glitzy or as popular as some of the Big Ten's elite, but what Joe Tiller brought to the team in his 10 years was substantive enough to get wins, break into the top 25, all while making the Big Ten title race a bit more interesting.

In the end, maybe Detroit in December is a fitting final stand for this team.  This is the last place in which the Boilermakers were involved in the NCAA postseason and a win could help close the door on a troubling regression under Hope.  It could be the positive momentum needed to help Purdue take its next step.

Or it could be another disappointing loss at a disappointing time; a reminder of just how stacked-against-them the odds really are in a place that knows a thing or two about bad circumstances.

I don't know if Purdue absolutely has to win the game, but I do know what it's like to be trapped in Detroit in December.  A few rays of sunlight through the clouds are enough sometimes to remind you that things will get better.  But that early in winter, it's easy to feel the days run together and worry that "this is the way it is and will always be."  Bleak, man.  Really bleak.

Purdue might not need the win, but something positive would be nice.  Especially when winter is this far from being over.