Sunk cost

Purdue got the first part right Sunday, painful as it must have been. It swallowed the ten or so million necessary to buy out football coach Ryan Walters' contract, and showed him the road out of West Lafayette.

You go 1-11 and winless in the Big Ten, these things will happen. You lose by a combined score of 132-7 to the two other football majors in your state, these things must happen.

A catastrophically bad Purdue team did that, losing 66-7 to Notre Dame at one end of the season and 66-0 to Indiana in the Old Oaken Bucket game at the other. In between there were some 56-7 and 49-10 wipeouts, as well as a stray 35-0 or two. But it was the Notre Dame and Indiana capitulations that did in the short-lived Walters regime.

Together, they served as bookends to what is possible when you make the right hire. The contrast with Purdue, who made the wrong one, was simply too stark to be tolerated another second.

And so, less than 24 hours after the surrender in Bloomington, Purdue declared Walters a sunk cost and ponied up the cash to send him on his way. Meanwhile, in South Bend, Marcus Freeman has the Irish 11-1 and cruising into the College Football Playoff; downstate, meanwhile, Curt Cignetti has the Hoosiers 11-1 and cruising toward the same.

There were some grumbles among the Domers when Brian Kelly blew town and Freeman was elevated from within to replace him, but hardly anyone is grumbling now. And Cignetti has energized an IU program even more chronically beige than Purdue's, which at least has a few Drew Breeses and Bob Grieses in its woodpile.

It also has the right hire in its history, if that means anything. Joe Tiller was the right hire, even if hardly anyone in the Midwest had heard of him when he landed in West Lafayette. Jeff Brohm was the right hire, even if the siren call of his alma mater (Louisville) lured him away.

And Ryan Walters?

Walters looked like the right hire, at least initially. He'd never been a head coach in the Big Ten before, but neither had most of the coaches in the Big Ten before they became coaches in the Big Ten. What he was, by all accounts, was a defensive genius who, as defensive coordinator at Illinois, turned the Illini into one of the most fearsome Ds in America.

But he turned out to be a disaster, an epic fail who made other recent epic fails (paging Danny Hope; paging Darrell Hazell) look like Vince Don Lombardi-Shula by comparison. Now athletic director Mike Bobinski and the same people who hired Walters must go back to the drawing board, two short years after they blew it big time.

Wild guess, but I'm thinking that scenario might keep the alums awake at night. Especially the ones with deep pockets.

I'm also thinking this: Whoever Purdue hires, he'll need to blow into town like Hurricane Cig did downstate. If 66-0 didn't seal Walters fate, after all, the fact recruits were bailing on his program left and right surely did. With the early signing period looming, Walters had just five recruits still locked in.

So this will be a total reconstruct. And thus crunch time squared for Bobinski and Co.

They got the first part right. The hard part awaits.