Wide open

The word came down on a perfect college football Saturday, crystalline blue skies and burnished-gold sunlight and the crispness of early autumn in the air. Joe Tiller's teams would have thrown it all over the lot on such a Saturday, which is a notable observation only because Joe Tiller's teams threw it all over the lot every Saturday.

Born a year to the day after Pearl Harbor, he died yesterday at the age of 74, in Buffalo, Wyoming, his favorite place on earth. He was a football coach and a husband and a father and a grandfather, and a hell of a guy.  There will be tributes, surely, a lot of them flowing out of West Lafayette, In., where he lifted football at Purdue to its feet and made it Quarterback U. again.

But the best tribute is what you saw on your TV screens yesterday afternoon and evening, because what you saw in a great sense is what Joe Tiller wrought.

He opened up the game, Joe Tiller did. He brought the spread offense to Purdue and to the Big Ten and eventually, in an ancestral sort of way, to the entire country.

Not bad for a guy everyone scratched his head over when Purdue announced his hiring.

The Big Three in Indiana all hired new coaches that year, 1997, and, from a pure buzz standpoint, Joe Tiller was the least of these. Indiana hired Cam Cameron, who was a high school football and basketball legend in Indiana and who had a reputation as a budding young coaching genius. Notre Dame elevated Bob Davie, Lou Holtz' faithful and accomplished lieutenant, to replace Holtz in South Bend. And Purdue?

Purdue hired ... Joe Tiller.

Who had just finished six successful seasons at Wyoming. But it was Wyoming, and Tiller was in his mid-50s by then, and so the general reaction around the state was this:

Oh, yeah, Cameron. Bright young guy. Good hire, IU.

Oh, yeah, Davie. Great coordinator. Good hire, ND.

Oh, ye-- wait, who? Joe Tiller? Who the hell is Joe Tiller?!

The guy partially responsible for putting Cameron and Davie out of work, as it turns out.

Cameron and Davie both departed after the 2001 season, by which time everyone knew who Joe Tiller was. He'd just taken Purdue to the 2001 Rose Bowl, its first trip there in 34 years. He was the midst of taking the Boilermakers, who previously had been to just five bowl games in their history, to 10 bowl games in 12 years. And he'd turned the plodding Big Ten into a wide-open passing league with the spread offense he brought from Wyoming.

In his first season he took a defensive back, Billy Dicken, and turned him into an all-conference quarterback. He strung wide receivers like Christmas lights along the line of scrimmage, made the words "bubble screen" into a staple in every Purdue game story, threw the football -- and won doing it -- in a way the old-timers said would never work in the Big Ten.

Well, it worked. To the tune of 85 victories in 12 seasons, which made Joe Tiller the winningest football coach in the history of a school that had had some coaches who won a lot. And by the time he left, a lot of other coaches in the Big Ten were using the spread offense, or variations of it.

As are coaches all over the country now.

As for Tiller, his last act at Purdue was to retain the Old Oaken Bucket in 2008. The Boilers laminated Indiana 62-10 that day. By that time, Tiller had outlasted two coaches in South Bend, and the third, Charlie Weis, was on his last legs. And he'd outlasted three in Bloomington -- including, tragically, Terry Hoeppner, who seemed to have IU on the right track when his life was cut short by a brain tumor.

Now Tiller is gone, too. And you'd like to think that, somewhere up there in the great beyond, he and Hoeppner are even now planning one last celestial tussle.

Joe brings the spread to heaven. Now there's a headline for ya.