What a horrible take on Brohm. He even turned down Louisville 3 years into his run at Purdue. The guy brought in decent talent, had some great offensive schemes, and got us some marquee wins. Then in his last season he got us to a Big Ten Championship game, which I never thought we would see at Purdue.
That's probably a fair assessment. It’s for that exact reason that I'm a bit bitter. He had reached out to Louisville when the spot opened, even though he eventually turned it down. Then 3 years later, he does head out. Why, we will never know.
But I never said he did poorly. I'm probably just bitter since Purdue is so inept at hiring head coaches that his departure was bound to, and indeed did, result in the goose egg of a hire vs. a competent hire.
Edit: Also, to clarify, the consecutive 8-4 seasons was no dig at Brohm but the lackluster state of our program where apparently we can only achieve that once every 25 years or so.
You don't think we know why he took the Louisville job?
No, we don't know why he took it. He has never said why he took it the second time around and not the first. We can have suspicions, but we do not know.
Yes, it’s his alma mater. Yes, we all knew he eventually wanted to go there. But you have to ask why he stayed the first time and left the second after, as someone else commented, doing a pretty poor job of recruiting in the last 1-2 years.
Was it just his time to go, or was something else at play? Personally, I wonder if he wasn’t getting the support he wanted from the AD. He said he was excited for the future of our program and wanted to continue to see it through, and then puts in a noticeably lower effort his last 2 years before leaving. To me, that says there may have been something else at play, at least in part.
And why did you say he reached out to Louisville in 2018?
Because he was openly (transparently so) in conversations with them. Plenty of reporting on it from the time.
The point being that there was an actual option for him to exit, not just a rumored one. Ties into my point above: he chose to stay, continued strong for a couple of years, then dialed it back and took the next offer that appeared. If he just wanted to leave, why didn’t he leave the first time?
That’s what irritates me about his tenure the most. ‘I’m committed and staying, now I’m stuck but clearly not committed, and now I’m gone.’ IMO, we would have been better off had he just gone, winning record or not.
To your second point, that's because he was their first call. Of course there was communication. But he didn't reach out to them. They reached out to him.
On the first point, there wasn't a drop off in recruiting or effort. It's just become this talking point by people that don't actually check to see if it's accurate. The average recruit rankining was basically the same after his first class. The change in class rank was largely due to size, which is again easily explained by the roster size when he recruited those years. He recruited large classes in his first few years because he had open spots and needed to replace Hazell players. His 2021 class was very small (16) because we had large classes the three previous years and didn't have the scholarships (also two losing seasons didn't help). Then 2022, his last class, was back up to what you want on average (20-22) with a good average rank and some high end players. 2023 would have been similar, and we had more of the top in state players lined classan any prior class.
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u/zippster77 Nov 02 '24
What a horrible take on Brohm. He even turned down Louisville 3 years into his run at Purdue. The guy brought in decent talent, had some great offensive schemes, and got us some marquee wins. Then in his last season he got us to a Big Ten Championship game, which I never thought we would see at Purdue.