Once Again, Boilermakers Expose #2 Iowa: Purdue 24 - Hawkeyes 7
Feature image from @BoilerFootball
David Bell’s last three games against Iowa: 13 receptions, 121 yards, 3 touchdowns in 2020. 13 receptions, 197 yards, 1 touchdown in 2019.
Today: 11 receptions, 240 yards, 1 touchdown.
Jeff Brohm versus supposed football genius and longtime Hawkeye football stalwart Kirk Ferentz? 4-1.
An unranked Purdue against a top 5 team?
I tried to tell you in the latest Handsome Hour that Iowa were frauds. The Hawkeyes boasted a phenomenal defense, but their top two cornerbacks were banged up. Meanwhile, Iowa’s offense ranked last in the Big Ten in total offense and points per game. Quarterback Spencer Petras has been protected by Iowa’s offensive line and lack of any come-from-behind spotlight, so as always getting an early lead on Iowa pushes them into a corner.
I came so close to calling for an upset on the Handsome Hour…but what held me back was Brohm’s insistence on going with Aiden O’Connell at quarterback seemingly without question this week. If Purdue didn’t come into the game with a different offensive outlook, I just couldn’t believe that an offense that scored 13 points in three straight games could put enough points on the board to beat the #2 ranked team in the country.
Jeff Brohm is a smarter football mind than this idiot is.
During the first long Purdue drive of the game, we saw all three quarterbacks see the field. AOC as the dropback passer, Jack Plummer as a dual-threat option, and Austin Burton as the runner. At one point, Purdue alternated quarterbacks for six straight plays as they pushed the ball forwards on a bewildered Iowa defense.
Purdue never trailed, and spent less than 3 game-minutes tied with the supposed #2 team in the country. The only moment that spurred a slight pause in the enthusiasm was TJ Sheffield stretching for the pylon, fumbling the ball forwards out-of-bounds (which, anywhere else on the field, would return the ball to the spot of the fumble) and hitting the pylon, resulting in an untimely touchback:
The dumbest rule in college football.
After an 85-yard drive, Iowa got the ball back with more than a quarter left to play, down by ten. But the Purdue defense, reinvented under Brad Lambert and Mark Hagen, held firm, forcing a three-play end to Iowa’s returning drive and halting any momentum the Hawkeyes generated by that accidental turnover.
(Someone please congratulate former Defensive Coordinator Bob Diaco, again, on running the greatest scam college football has ever known.)
Meanwhile, Iowa spent the entire game single-covering David Bell and giving him plenty of cushion, leading him to carve up the Hawkeyes with metronome-like reliability:
Once every season, for each of his five years as Purdue coach, Jeff Brohm reminds us why we were so excited when he decided to take the lead of our burnt husk of a football program in 2017, and why we were thrilled when he turned down a return to his alma mater to stay loyal to Rondale Moore and Purdue three years ago.
Today, we again saw that excitement of first-year Brohm – an offense with unbounded creativity, a devastating weapon at wide receiver, an aggressive defense that unmoors the entire passing game. Throw in a gamebreaking pass-rushing threat in George Karlaftis, and this is what we were hoping to see in the cursed 2020 season, and what we’ve been missing as Purdue fans during the 2021 season thus far.
Honestly, it makes the rest of Purdue’s schedule look friendly, particularly with a 6- or 7-win season as a goal. Home against a limping Wisconsin and Nebraska, then a Michigan State team that looks far less threatening than Iowa, (at Ohio State woo yup let’s just whistle and skip over this one), an awful Northwestern at Wrigley Field, and home for the Bucket versus a reeling Indiana.
Purdue lost their margin for error by fumbling away the win against Minnesota. They got it back by flattening Iowa, as is tradition under Jeff Brohm.
Meanwhile, it seems like the broader public has forgotten that Kirk Ferentz and the University of Iowa are currently being sued by over a dozen former Hawkeye football stars for running a blatantly racist and harmful football program.
Not only is Kirk Ferentz a boring, inflexible, mediocre football coach running an archaic on-field product – he also is perfectly happy to exploit the non-white players that choose to play football in Iowa City, players who bleed and sweat without compensation to earn him every penny of his $3 million annual salary, all while turning a blind eye towards racist slurs that his staff hurled without second thought at these 18 to 23 year-olds playing a game.
Ferentz and the entire staff should have been fired a year ago, the instant these allegations were verified by dozens of former players and held up in court. But if constant losing to Purdue is what finally does the trick, I’ll take it.
