What will come in 2020-21 for Purdue Football?
Milton Wright scoring his first career touchdown when Maryland visited Ross-Ade Stadium on Oct. 12th 2019.The world, still being amid the COVID-19 pandemic, is doing all it can to lay out the roadmap for returning to normalcy. With that in mind, there has been a lot of discussion going Alton in the world on whether or not there would be a college football season this year. Being an optimist though, I will assume that the world will continue on and therefore I will plow ahead full steam and begin looking towards the upcoming college football season! In terms of our Boilers, I believe that hope springs eternal and if the Boilers can correct some issues we could be in for an exciting season in West Lafayette!
What went wrong?
Before we look ahead though, let’s look back at the 2019-20 campaign and see what went wrong, and I think the most obvious issues became apparent pretty early on. In the first game of the season when Purdue played @Nevada we saw a complete meltdown watching the Wolfpack hit what felt like an impossible field goal as time expired to complete the comeback. That was a game where Purdue seemingly go whatever they wanted on Offense, but turnovers and a fading defense late doomed them.
Although the Nevada loss stung, if they just cleaned up a few things (turnovers) then there was still potential for some fun football going forward. We saw this in the Vanderbilt game which Purdue played some exciting football and came out with the win. It did bring us to our second issue for the 2019 season though, and it was injuries! We saw Elijah Sindelar leave late in the game after a questionably designed quarterback draw. This would only be the beginning as two games later the Boilers would lose Sindelar and star WR Rondale Moore on the same play against Minnesota at home. This injury trend would continue throughout the season leading to the Freshman Boom as Purdue became a team dominated by a talented freshman at every position. It’s not all bad so let’s finally look ahead to 2020-21 and we’ll start with the schedule!
Schedule: Can we stop for a second and admire the Purdue Creative team. They have been killing it the last few years and this new schedule poster is no different!
I’m going to go into more depth on the individual games as we near the fall. So I’ll take this moment to express how I for one have loved how Purdue has scheduled games the last few years, and I know that most of it was handled long ago as college football games are scheduled many many years in advance. As much fun as getting cupcake wins over FCS teams is. I want to see my Boilers take on the best. I believe that it also helps the national brand for Purdue because when talking heads on TV talk about the hardest schedules for the year, Purdue has routinely been near the top. When you extend this thought out to recruiting, Purdue can now flaunt to recruits that they will get to play all of these teams allowing them to compete against the best. It’s frustrating sometimes that Purdue doesn’t have those buy games, but at the end of the day, these high major games will only help prepare the Boilers for the grind that is B1G play!
Key Pieces:
As with the schedule, we’ll go more in-depth with the different players/position groups over time but we can quickly take a look at some of the key position groups as well as questions regarding those groups for the upcoming season.
Firstly, I would be ignorant not to start with the luxury of riches that Purdue now has at the skill positions on offense. With Rondale Moore coming off an injury, David Bell coming off a 1000yd receiving season. That is a tandem that will give opposing coaching staffs’ nightmares all season long. I am personally excited to see Amad Anderson and Mershawn Rice and their progression as I think pairing them with Bell/Moore gives Purdue so many weapons on offense. I would also be foolish not to mention Maliq Carr, but we’ll go into more depth with the incoming class in another article. The point being that Purdue has one of the most dangerous WR rooms in the country and I for one can not be more excited.
Another big question mark is the QB position. In 2019 we saw 3 different QB’s take the field for Purdue. Elijah Sindelar, Jack Plummer, and Aiden O’Connell. With Sindelar gone the starting position now appears to be Jack Plummer’s but one can’t overlook the play of the walk-on in O’Connell who took over for Plummer at the end of the season. The QB battle will be fierce and whoever is under center on 9/5 will have certainly earned the job.
The last big question mark moving forward is the major coaching change that took place early in the offseason. 3 year DC Nick Holt was not brought back and Purdue hired Bob Diaco a former Notre Dame DC looking to shake things up and get more out of the defense. The defense did indeed do Purdue no favors as they routinely broke down in pass coverage and generated very few turnovers. The major change will be switching from a 4-3 base defense to Diaco’s 3-4. I will cover this in a future article in more detail, but I think this year could be another year where the defense struggles as the players adjust to the new system.
As mentioned a few times, this is just a quick tease about the 2020-21 Purdue Football season. We will be going into more depth as time goes on. With no sports happening currently, I think some analysis of last year’s (2019) games may be in order so we can find more points of emphasis to focus on moving into 2020-21.
As always, Boiler Up, Hammer Down, Hail Purdue!
