Danny Hope, Purdue Consigliere

The Journal & Courier has a great story up by the consistently good and true pro Mike Carmin about how Purdue landed Jeff Brohm and how those final, tense hours went. It’s an interesting look into how the mayhem plays out at the end of the college football season when teams are jockeying to land their preferred coaches.  It also shows us that guys we worried didn’t have the level of commitment to the football program – namely Daniels and Mike Berghoff – were indeed all-in on Mike Bobinski’s top choice.

Bobinski had done all of the leg work bringing Brohm to this point in the process. Daniels and Berghoff laid out the compensation boundaries to Bobinski, who presented a verbal offer. 

"We told him, “Mike, don’t let anything stand in the way of getting our guy. When you’re convinced it’s the guy we’ll make sure it happens,' " Berghoff said.

Now, this could of course be Berghoff’s version of things and that might have a little pride mixed into it. But the fact remains that the trio – while sharing an iPhone on speaker at Daniels’ house, which feels like such a Purdue-ish part of this story – came together and were in absolutely lockstep on convincing their top choice and a hot coaching commodity to go with Purdue.

There’s also a fascinating nugget in there about how Brohm spoke with Danny Hope about the job. You really have to respect Brohm’s thorough nature. He likely thought about a guy who was a coach there recently and didn’t leave thrilled with things…and figured it made sense to get his story. I’m glad, however, that we did not know Danny Hope was advising Jeff Brohm on this decision at the time. I’m not sure how well I would have slept.

In the end, Hope told him to take the job – of course he did. Danny Hope loved being Purdue’s head coach and he probably said that the only thing he didn’t like was having Morgan Burke as his athletic director. And on that, we tend to line up with ol’ Danny.

Speaking of Burke, it’s hard for him not to look worse and worse here in hindsight. The program had stalled completely, success was a distant memory, he made two terrible football hires, there were no real tangible improvements to the buildings or stadium in his final decade…but as soon as he’s being eased out the door, massive overhauls of the facilities and general mentality take shape?

We all believed that Burke and Mitch Daniels were in lockstep on the whole “we’re not going to get into an arms race” mentality. But it’s beginning to look like Daniels is a guy who trusts the people he has in place…and so if Burke told him it didn’t make sense to try to keep up, maybe Daniels figured he should allow Burke to do his job – that’s what a good leader does. Once Bobinski was in place and made it clear to Daniels that he wanted a guy like Brohm to resurrect the program, Daniels and Berghoff appear to have once again deferred to the expertise of the athletic director.

It sounds like Brohm was aware that he had a good thing going at WKU and that continued success might lead to a more prominent Power 5 school coming after him. But the commitment shown from the Purdue leadership is what swayed him –imagine that. He felt pretty quickly that he made the right choice, which is also always good.

“After I got here, ‘yeah, this is what I want to do,’ ” Brohm said. “I feel there are a lot of hungry people around here that want the same thing and for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened but they’re ready for somebody to grab the bull by the horns and make it happen.

“You do have support here. Is there a lot of room to improve? You bet there is. Now, I have to find a way to get it done.”

We’re ready, Coach. Let’s play football.