Delayed Reaction to Morgan Burke's Passing
Photocredit: Sportngin.com
As recently as a few minutes ago, my pals; fellow BSers and I, were trading stories with one another about interactions with Purdue’s former AD, Morgan Burke. One of the issues with a figurehead or celebrity’s life, is that it’s really easy to dehumanize them because of our perception of positive or negative impact on our world…in Mr. Burke’s case, we knew a bit of Morgan as a person and a whole lot more of him as a leader of Purdue’s athletic department.
I’m not going to give you the sugar-coated view of him posthumously as if you couldn’t easily look up (or recall, for that matter) what we really thought of Burke’s decisions as Purdue’s AD. We didn’t agree with everything he did…in fact, we didn’t agree with much of what he did as an athletic director, especially in his last few years in that position. We felt like he ran the place in an old-fashion manner as the college sports landscape was rapidly changing. That said, he was widely respected by his peers and NCAA AD counterparts, even as some of the Purdue fanbase struggled to understand why he was doing what he was doing.
He made some awful hires, but some monumental hires that might be judged even better as time passes. He whiffed on hiring Bob Davie as Purdue’s Head Football Coach, then hired the winningest football coach in the program’s history, for instance. He also hired a very affordable successor to the legendary Gene Keady…who might eventually go down as Purdue’s winningest men’s basketball coach.
He went the cheap route on more than one occasion, when hiring a head coach, and often didn’t give his head coaches large enough budgets to really compete with many of their conference counterparts…but eventually, as BTN distributions allowed school revenues to increase, he started to loosen the purse strings…a bit.
He improved the Olympic and lower-revenue generating sports’ facilities 100 fold; new venues and higher expectations led to national titles in aquatic events and golf, that I would have never predicted as an alum and lifelong Boilermaker fan. Under his watch the women’s basketball program became one of the best in the nation for a period of time, the volleyball program became nationally respected and even the baseball, women’s soccer and other programs drastically improved.
He ran the athletic program as a debt-free, self-sustaining entity, even before TV monies really began rolling in. Before massive TV contracts changed the landscape of college sports, only a handful of programs could say that. I think that’s the thing that many Purdue fans, and outsiders, think of when asked about Burke’s legacy…but I hope in the next few years, through a different prism, we look back a bit differently.
Burke’s Purdue athletic department hired coaches that recruited athletes that seemed to be really easy to root for and fully support. Sure, there were some bumps in the 23 year road in which some of the players were tougher to like, but overall, the people and the faces that really define Purdue athletics were a hard-working, talented and honest lot…that’s a pretty damned good legacy.
On top of that, the look and feel of Purdue athletics went from archaic in 1993 when he started, to modernized and refreshed and even forward-looking, by 2016, the year he officially retired from the post.
Mike Bobinski took over a much better athletic department than the one Burke inherited…and Burke was still working on making things better even as he was on his way out of the door. Case in point: the later completed/named Kozuch Football Performance Complex, that is truly one of the best facilities in the nation, is having impact on players, fans and even recruits, as we speak.
As a person, Burke was one of the most engaging people that I have ever met. I talked to him alone in his office in 1993 after my Dad told me that I should go and re-introduce myself to him in person (I had met him years earlier). I saw him and joked around with him again on multiple occasions in the subsequent two-plus decades. He easily recalled my Dad’s name, our family connections and other key points of interest each time…his recall memory and ability to connect, at least when I talked to him, was incredible. In that way, he was like the best CEOs around. He also never got upset or locked horns with me publicly, although he knew who I was (as a part-time desenter of many of his decisions on this very website).
Sure, a couple of the people within his athletic department didn’t like me or some of the content that came out of this website. One of those people is still on Purdue’s staff. But as a guy, I liked Morgan Burke a lot. And as an alum, I’m proud of the way he presented himself and represented our fair alma mater to the world. He was a Purdue student first, then an outstanding Purdue athlete, then a fiery Purdue fan and finally its AD.
He was a great Boilermaker by any measure. I believe history will judge him as one of the foundational parts of a Golden Purdue Era (yeah, I think our future is quite bright in West Lafayette). At 68 years old, he’s clearly gone too early.
Rest in peace, rest easy, Mr. Burke.
