Today's ag report comes to us from California, where Purdue's stock rose, fell and then rose once again in the Foster Farms Bowl, a Free Advertising For Whatever Foster Farms Is production that was a pretty entertaining exhibition of American college football as these things go.
Final score: Boilermakers 38, Arizona 35.
Which means Jeff Brohm's first season as Purdue's coach ends with a winning record (7-6) and a bowl victory. He did this, mind you, with the same bunch of sadsacks who went 3-8 a year ago. If you're a Purdue alum or fan, this is wonderful news -- and also the worst news ever.
On the one hand, it looks as if Purdue finally found a suitable successor to the late, and legendary, Joe Tiller.
On the other hand, it looks as if Purdue finally found someone else's next head coach.
This is how it works in the upper strata of college football, a purely corporate enterprise whose job it is to make the universities it nominally represents rich. Purdue is part of that strata, as a member of the Big Ten. But it's also not part of that strata, because the upper strata is a multi-layered construct in which some schools are higher on the corporate ladder than others.
In the corporate world, this leads to hostile takeovers of kinda-big companies by stupendously big companies. In the college football world, it leads to stupendously big programs regularly raiding the kinda-bigs for their head coaches.
Purdue, alas, is a kinda-big. It's big-time, but not BIG-TIME. And that means it's doomed to spend its days fretting when it picks a guy who drives the program into a tree, and fretting when it picks a guy who lifts up the program enough to land on BIG TIME's radar.
And so even though Brohm hadn't even been in West Lafayette for a year, his name briefly surfaced in relation to higher-profile job openings late this fall. And next year, if he continues on the trajectory everyone at Purdue expects, his name will surface again when other higher-profile jobs come open. Eventually, maybe sooner than later, his name will do more than just surface.
Them's the breaks, folks. And so Boiler Up while you can, Purdue.
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