Purdue football woes

cubfanindy

My Boilermakers have been horrible lately. Early in the season, I took the schedule and penciled in the wins and losses. Thus far, they’ve gone as predicted, with the Minnesota win being what I thought would be the benchmark game. However, since then, they’ve been so bad that I’m looking ahead at the remaining games, and questioning some of those. At the start of the season, I had Michigan State penciled in as a loss. They’ve proven to be pretty bad as well though, and IU has proved themselves to be better than expected. My concerns stem from the last two games, especially the last one. The Penn State game was a very winnable game. Penn State was flat, and didn’t play well at all. Granted, they moved the ball, but couldn’t really punch it in when it mattered. Unfortunately, I feel it was due to Penn State mistakes and not the Purdue defense playing well. My worry? I never thought it would be the OFFENSE costing us games. 12-0? With all of the talent on that offense, there is no reason at all they shouldn’t score at least 14 points in ANY game.

So the question now is this – is Joe Tiller to blame?
I have historically been a big Tiller supporter. He came into a losing program in 97, took them to Bowl Game with essentially the same team that Colletto had the season before, but WITHOUT monster fullback Mike Alstott, and was named National Coach of the Year by both Football News and Kickoff magazines. He then took the Boilers to seven more bowl games in a row after that.
On the basketball side of things, Purdue recently parted ways with Gene Keady. Keady used to be a great coach, but his last years at Purdue it seemed he was mailing it in. It appeared he was just going through the motions, collecting a paycheck, and was never really committed to winning and improving the basketball program. It seemed like he was tired, was near retirement, and had done everything in his career he was going to do, so he just didn’t care anymore.
Is this what’s going on with Tiller? His contract goes through 2010. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t retire at that point.
I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Right now, I’m putting a majority of the issues on Curtis Painter, the quarterback. He’s been awful. Doesn’t that boil down to Tiller in the end, though?
We’ll see what changes are made for Saturday’s Michigan State game.

Purdue football woes - Is Tiller to blame?