On Morgan Burke and Purdue February 19, 2016
Posted by intellectualgridiron in Sports.Tags: ad, Appalachian State, Arena, athletics, B1G, Big Ten, Brian Kelly, Danny Hope, Darrell Hazell, David Boudia, director, Drew Brees, EKU, Golden Flashes, James Franklin, Jim Harbaugh, Joe Tiller, Kent State, Mackey, Mark Dantonio, Morgan Burke, NCAA, Purdue, Ross-Ade, trustees, Urban Meyer
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Morgan J. Burke has been the Athletics Director at Purdue University for more than 20 years. On Thursday, Feb. 11, he announced that he would retire from this position, effective June of next year. During his lengthy tenure, he has garnered a reputation amongst his peers as one of the most competent AD’s in major college athletics, especially in terms of finances. With so many AD’s spending money as if their budgets were bottomless pits, Burke has been very fiscally sound, and has enjoyed the deserved reputation as a prudent business manager as a result.
When he took over as the top athletics administrator in 1993, Purdue had the absolute worst athletics program in the Big Ten. Hammer and Rails has an article that puts this in perspective, including that fact that the football program only had five (yes, five) bowl appearances total in its history, and was in year eight of a 12-year bowl game drought. The schools’ baseball, ahem, “stadium” would have been considered poor by high school standards. The swimming and diving teams’ home pool was in some hidden location underground at Lambert Fieldhouse. Ross-Ade Stadium was practically falling apart. In short, the department itself was operating on a shoestring budget with awful facilities and teams badly-performing as a result.
In the span of Burke’s tenure, Ross-Ade received much-needed renovations, including leading the way in building an aircraft carrier-sized press box on the side of one’s football stadium. The football team has enjoyed 12 bowl appearances between 1997 and 2012, including an elusive and prestigious Rose Bowl berth. Mackey Arena has also enjoyed major upgrades, along with being home to a men’s team that has delivered four men’s basketball Big Ten titles and a women’s national championship. For what it’s worth, women’s golf brought home the national title in 2010. A nice, more comprehensive list of all that Burke has done well can be found here.
Moreover, (again, for what it’s worth), women’s soccer, softball, baseball, and tennis all have new facilities. The new swimming and diving pool, opened up ca. 2000, is considered one of the finest college natatoria in the whole country. While not exactly on most people’s radar screens, Purdue has become a diving powerhouse (e.g., David Boudia, 2012 Olympic gold medalist).
And yet, to speak with the Purdue University faithful these days, the firm impression is that the athletics department is in an absolute shambles. Sure, it’s all well and good that the softball, baseball and soccer teams have wonderful facilities, and a fine reflection on the university that the swim teams have a jewel of a pool to call their own. But there are problems afoot with the two highest-profile programs, those being football and men’s basketball.
The latter has been performing very inconsistently as of late, what with promising recruiting classes that fail to live up to their potential. But even worse and more urgent is the absolute disgrace of the football team. Coach Joe Tiller’s teams’ performances started waning during his last few years, especially since the 2005 season. When former assistant coach to Tiller in Danny Hope took over (he had been the head coach at Eastern Kentucky University from 2003 through 2007), things kept declining further (5-7 in 2009, 4-8 in 2010). Coach Hope enjoyed only two bowl appearances after going 7-6 in 2011 and 6-6 in 2012. Ironically, he was fired despite a bowl berth in 2012.
Herein lies a symptom of a systemic problem. Purdue has been NOTORIOUS for not paying its coaches even average market value. Coach Tiller was one of the lowest-paid football coaches in the conference for one, and that did not change when the torch was passed to Coach Hope. In college football, it’s all about the coach and the kind of playing talent that coach is able to recruit. Just see what Brian Kelly has achieved at Notre Dame, in this era’s Sunbelt-dominated era of college football, or how Jim Harbaugh has been turning things around at Michigan to illustrate this crucial point.
Basically, Burke tried to make things work with Coach Hope while giving him a shoestring budget. Coach Hope in turn did what he could with such a dearth of resources, but his performance on the field reflected the fact that he was not getting the type of support he needed to compete effectively in major college football. Firing him became tantamount to killing the messenger.
But there are other dimensions to this problem. Before and during the Coach Hope era, Purdue’s reputation for under-paying its athletic personnel was well-founded and deserved. Even competent, ambitious people who worked on the administrative side of the department would leave for better pay at other schools, even to the intra-conference competition. That especially went for assistant coaches who were worth a thing in the sport; after a few years of building a reputation at Purdue, they would soon leave for greener pastures. As Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd often reminds us, “[C]oaches do not care about your fight song: PAY them!”
Burke seemed to have gotten that memo when searching for a new football coach in the wake of Coach Hope’s departure. He announced that he was raising additional funds to try to attract a better coaching talent. Eventually, the searched settled on Darrell Hazell, then the head coach at Kent State who had a good year with the Golden Flashes (as an aside, snapping up a MAC coach who has had only one or two good years there into a Power Five Conference team is always a risky roll of the dice). Case in point: while Coach Hope’s base salary was $925,000 a year, Coach Hazell’s base salary was $1,750,000. Better, but still not enough to attract talent on par with, say, James Franklin of Penn State or Mark Dantonio at Michigan State, let alone Urban Meyer or Jim Harbaugh.
Moreover, when the bigger players in the B1G are searching for their new coach, they never seem to have to announce some fundraising effort to be able to offer a big-name, proven winner of a coach a competitive salary. Yet Purdue had to announce such an effort just to be able to pay its coach $1.75 million, which is still sub-average among the Power Five.
Before drilling even deeper to the root problem, let us keep things in perspective for now. Burke has been proven that he is among the best AD’s in the country in terms of two things. One is operations. Having attended the Big Ten wrestling championships, hosted in Mackey Arena on March 3, 2012, I can personally attest that they were carried out flawlessly.
The other is financials. The Big Ten is home to some gigantic athletics departments that include both Michigan and Ohio State, both of whom have a figurative license to print money. Purdue, meanwhile is at a systemic disadvantage in that its athletic department receives ZERO money from the university. Despite that handicap, Burke has led a very financially sound department, with each fiscal year ending in the black.
But Burke’s weakness has been talent acquisition, which, frankly, is 90 percent of his job in the public’s eye. He lucked out with Coach Tiller, who in hindsight had a limited shelf life of effectiveness without Drew Brees. He tried going cheap with Coach Hope after Tiller, and that ended up crippling the program. Although he doubled the head football coach’s salary at Purdue, he has wasted it on Darrell Hazell. Granted, Hazell is a fine man who has raised outstanding kids and has done everything beyond reproach. Moreover, he has done wonderful, marvelous things in reaching out to football alums.
Yet despite being a fine gentleman off the field, Coach Hazell’s on-the-field record has been only 6-30 in three seasons. This dismal performance has led to a damaging effect on Purdue’s athletic and thus academic reputation to average people. It has in turn led to major frustrations on the part of the Purdue alumni and related faithful. Since Burke hired Hazell, a good bulk of this frustration has understandably been laid at the feet of the AD.
Thus, the initial reaction to the announcement of Burke’s eventual retirement: why wait so long when a changing of the guard appears to be in order? Sixteen months seems like a long time to wait to take the program into a new direction. More to the point, is the change desperately in order? Answer: yes and no. A two-decade tenure for an athletics director is long enough. After that lengthy span of time, new blood is needed, with new leadership to take the department in new directions. Given the current, disgraceful abyss of the football program and the inconsistent performance of men’s basketball, that new direction is obviously, desperately needed.
But will a changing of the guard at AD really help beget that? After extensive deliberation and searching of perspectives, I am led to conclude that a new AD alone might not help bring about the change Purdue desperately needs. Perhaps Burke’s ineptitude at hiring a proven, big-name coach was a symptom of his being hamstrung by the Board of Trustees.
Most universities “get it.” That is, they understand that college athletics, and football in particular, are front porches to their universities. Meaning, the trustees of most major universities understand that football is the primary marketing tool, and they thus see the football team as a way of leveraging and building the schools’ entire reputation in the eyes of the general public. Purdue, in contrast, sees athletics as a secondary mission, and has historically chosen to put academics first. While this is noble, it is also short-sighted, given the context of today’s society, where we accept the use of a school’s football team as the primary promotion tool as normal and indeed, expected.
When podunk Appalachian State was vying for three consecutive national titles as the FCS level in football last decade, it was a huge shot in the arm for that school. During a home game in the playoffs in 2007, the university’s president was on the sidelines wearing an ASU football jersey, joyously telling the sideline reporter for ESPN that applications for potential students to attend that university had skyrocketed. Enough said.
Thus we are led to the core problem at hand: why do the members of Purdue’s Board of Trustees fail to grasp this? As long as they fail to understand this basic, modern tenet of university promotion, it might not matter how capable Burke’s replacement at AD will be.
College Football Drills in Wintertime February 28, 2013
Posted by intellectualgridiron in Sports.Tags: 06:00, 6 A.M., 6 AM, 6 AM's, ball, Clemson, coach, college, conditioning, Cup, directional, drills, football, Fulmer, Georgia, Jim Colletto, Joe Tiller, Mark Richt, mat, Mollenkopf, NCAA, North Texas, practice, puke, Purdue, spring, Sun Belt, winter
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We are still in the winter season, normally associated with basketball, wrestling (the non-pro kind!) and Winter Olympic-related sports. The Super Bowl has been concluded for almost a month by now, and the college football bowl games have been over for almost two. But do not think that nothing is going on in the world of college football; things are anything but sleepy in that world right now, and I don’t mean the latest developments in the Fulmer Cup, either!
The truth is, college football is very active right now, just not active in the way that ordinary fans, hard-core and casual alike, can readily see or discern. That is because fans do not see the tough conditioning drills that players put themselves through (scratch that, that COACHES put players through) during the week, often at very inconvenient times of day, to get them ready for Spring Ball.
Conditioning is the game, here. The NCAA restricts coaches to 15 spring practice sessions, so there’s no time to waste on gassers or the like when there’s plenty of schematic options to explore to see how they play out and to try to install new offensive stuff for the regular season come Fall.
That means that these boys need to be in shape for all of that. What is truly interesting is all the different approaches that coaching staffs take towards these conditioning sessions, starting with what their nomenclature. One generic, all-purpose term is “winter conditioning drills,” since they last from early February, usually, to early March, though that alone varies from program to program. Another term some teams use is “mat drills,” since some of the conditioning drills take place on wrestling mats or a similar playing surface. At Purdue, we just called them “6 AM’s”, since that’s when these drills officially began.
Six-AM’s are a royal pain in the ass. There, I said it. Some coaches seem to agree, with is why schools of thought differ even on this approach, since some programs WISELY undertake these conditioning sessions in the AFTERNOON (why, what a novel idea!). As disastrous a head coach as Jim Colletto was while at Purdue, one of the few bright spots during an otherwise dark time for the program was that he had said conditioning drills held in the afternoon, when normal people are still, you know, functional. Coach Joe Tiller, however, in a hasty move to — otherwise commendably — change the tone of the program (and goodness knows it needed a change of tone at the time) had them in the morning, hence the term at the beginning of this paragraph.
But Purdue is not the only one; many a program from UConn to USC has had these sessions at 06:00, for whatever reason. Luckily, there are voices of reason at big-time programs that still have them in the afternoon. Take Georgia, for example (this policy alone strengthens my faith in Mark Richt’s adept leadership):
FYI, those human-centipede push-ups are a lot harder than they look! Notice the presence of a red mat in the middle of the indoor practice field, though. We never used a mat for drills on the astroturf playing field of Mollenkopf Athletic Center (field turf was finally installed in there in 2006), which might account for the absence of the mat drill term within our organizational lexicon.
Still, another interesting thing to marvel is what sort of combination of drills the coaches prefer to get their players into shape. We never did the human-centipede push-up drill at Purdue, for example, but one constant one will find from program to program are all sorts of directional drills. Those are simply where the coaches have players run or side-shuffle in one direction then instantly turn to run in a different direction and so on. Players would go to various drill stations throughout the session and about four or five-minute intervals, and variations of directional drills were usually two out of several of said stations. Because two stories of staircases leading to the coaches’ offices were located close to the indoor field, another station was to have players run up and down said stairs — ensuring that endurance and power were covered!
Clemson is considered a big-time program, but sadly they still cling to the out-dated notion of having drills pre-dawn. North Texas, an inconsistent contender in the Sun Belt, also still have their sessions before sunrise.
Notice the good examples of directional drills show in the above video. The tug-of-war drill is no doubt a cool idea! Another constant one sees during these drills from program to program are the puke buckets. Part of the job of the managers are to set up these drills (meaning they must report around 5:30 AM), and part of the setting-up is placing those plastic, dark gray garbage cans in, er, strategic areas for players to conveniently access in the split second before they blow hash. On further review, one advantage to running before dawn is that one needs not to worry about losing one’s breakfast!
At Purdue, after the players were thoroughly worn out from all the drills, to cap things off, the coaches had them run 100-yard wind sprints repeatedly. After all of that, the session would not be completed until all the players on the team did positioning drills (lie on your back, the whistle blows, then you instantly switch to lying on your chest, etc.) to the coaches’ satisfaction. Doing these twice a week to start out seemed manageable. Three times a week and it wears considerably on you; but at four times a week, it pushes you towards the brink of insanity, and makes you jump for joy when it comes time for spring practices to commence. At least we could brag, though, that we practiced while [normal] people slept!
Addendum, 04-03-13: Yes, by now, spring practices are in full-swing all across the land, but I just came across a video of Purdue’s 6 AM drills for 2013, and naturally found that to be a great fit for the article — enjoy!
The End of the Danny Hope Era at Purdue: a postmortem and a forward look November 30, 2012
Posted by intellectualgridiron in Sports.Tags: Adam Rittenberg, athletics, B1G, Bear Bryant, Big 10, Big Ten, Boiler, Boilermakers, CEO, Coach Hope, Coach Tiller, Colin Cowherd, college, Danny Hope, department, dept., Drew Brees, ESPN, football, Gary Nord, Howard Schnellenberger, Illinois, Indiana, Joe Tiller, Kevin Wilson, Matt Light, Michigan, Morgan Burke, NCAA, NFL, Purdue, Tim Beckman, Tom Brady, Wisconsin
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Over the past few days, the word about Coach Danny Hope’s firing has spread like wildfire. In four seasons as Purdue’s head football coach, Hope was 22-27, with no appreciable signs of improvement from when he took over from Coach Joe Tiller at the helm. This particular development had been, according to rumors, that Athletics Director Morgan J. Burke had actually been planned since Purdue’s blowout loss at home to Wisconsin. Be that as it may, the development having been brought to fruition has opened a floodgate of after-the-fact criticism against the man, something I flat-out refuse to join.
Say what you want about Coach Hope: he treated those who played under him as well as those who worked under him more than equitably. He cared for every one of his players as if they were all his sons. Coach Hope and I go back about 15 years, when I first met him at Coach Tiller’s summer football camp for high school players. Starting a year later, I was an aide to him while a student manager on the Purdue team, helping him out on the sidelines during games while he was the offensive line coach under Joe Tiller. In the subsequent years that followed, he went out of his way to make me feel like part of the football family, be it at Eastern Kentucky University – a long story! – or at Purdue as well. I have awesome articles of athletic-themed attire that I shall forever treasure wearing – stuff that he personally gave me.
But I am not the only one ever grateful, ever true to the man now stepping down as head man of the Purdue football team. None other than Drew Brees and Matt Light consider Coach Hope “their coach.” Drew has been quoted as saying that he would run through a brick wall for Hope. Matt Light, former all-pro offensive tackle, not to mention the man who protected Tom Brady’s blind side for a solid decade, has credited Coach Hope with molding him into an NFL lineman.
Bear Bryant was known to say “[i]f anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it.
If anything goes real good, you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games.” With every big win – few as there were – Hope always passed the credit along to his players. When Purdue won in Michigan Stadium for the first time in over four decades, Coach Hope was almost in tears on account of how proud he was of his boys and how well they played.
Moreover, when Hope’s tenure began, on paper, it was a good hire. He was the perfect organizational/cultural fit, having served under Coach Tiller all those years. Moreover, anybody who has met the man could not help but love him, what with his high-energy, high-enthusiasm personality that could brighten up any room. Better yet, he brought in Gary Nord as offensive coordinator. Both learned the coaching ropes together under the legendary Howard Schnellenberger, so obviously they had the pedigree. Between Hope’s high-energy approach towards motivating players and Nord’s abilities with the X’s and O’s, it seemed to be an awesome match. Sadly, things did not turn out that way, as the results clearly show.
The question becomes, why? One plausible explanation is that Hope’s under-performance is the symptom of a bigger issue within Purdue’s athletics dept. One of Purdue’s dirty little secrets is, historically they under-compensate their personnel compared to other Big Ten athletics programs. Anybody with any ambition at all puts in their time, enhances their resumes, then leave for, er, greener pastures, leaving behind good people that stay out of a combination of loyalty (commendable though that may be) and lack of options.
To put things even more bluntly, Purdue is notoriously cheap when it comes to paying its coaches. That could explain Coach Hope’s woes, to an extent. A cursory survey will reveal that Purdue has the lowest football coaches’ salaries of any staff in the B1G. Not good. Hope himself was the lowest-paid head coach in the conference, making only $950,000 this year. Yes, I know, to the vast majority of people, that is a tidy sum. But when you consider that even Tim Beckman of Illinois makes $1.6 million, or even Kevin Wilson of lowly Indiana makes $1.2 million annually, something is dreadfully wrong in Boilerland.
The same problem applies to underpaying assistant coaches. Therefore, the head coach does what he can to bring in assistants, but once they build up their resume, they then go somewhere else where they can make more money. Successful football programs depend in part with coaching continuity. Don’t believe me? Look at what happened to mighty Texas when the bulk of their assistants left, or the slump Florida found itself in for a while. Now imagine the havoc that is wrought on a program like Purdue from lack of such continuity. To quote ESPN’s Colin Cowherd, coaches do not care about your school’s fight song: pay them!
That brings us to the another major point. Morgan Burke right now faces the awesome task of finding a new CEO of the football program to take it in a new, better direction. Certain names have been tossed around here and there, but no matter whom they hire, if Burke does not take a crowbar to the department’s wallet, Purdue will be in the same situation it is in now in three or four years’ time.
Adam Rittenberg, a blogger of espn.com has reported that Burke is putting together a $4.5 million fund for the next coach. If that is true, then maybe, after all these years, it has sunk in that he needs to pay his football coaches substantially more than in the past, distant and recent. Yes, Burke deserves credit for ably managing the athletics department’s bottom line, but that bottom line itself is in jeopardy if the team keeps losing games and the fans vote with their feet in the form of lost ticket revenue. As the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money. Winning games makes money, and to win games, Purdue needs to raise football coaches’ pay (both head coach and assistants) if they want to get anywhere. Let us hope that the rumored $4.5 million is made available soon for the best coaching talent out there. But by that same token, assembling those funds should be a sign that Burke et al. have finally figured out that winning in the Big Ten (or any other “Big Six” conference these days) costs money, and they do deserve some credit for figuring that out, even if belatedly.
Another problem for the program was the offensive strategy combined with a stale culture. Concerning the latter, let us face it: bringing in Coach Hope to replace Coach Tiller was, in some regards, more of the same. The head coach is CEO of the football program. Like a chief executive, his job is to not only set the strategy, but also the culture and tone of the organization. Bringing in Hope was more of the same in that the Tiller influence was able to linger longer than it should. Coach Tiller did a wonderful job of bringing Purdue out of the wretched Jim Colletto era doldrums, but after a while, things became stale. Furthermore, his one-sided “basketball on grass” was becoming less and less effective. Frankly, Drew Brees and his ability to work the on-field magic that he did made Tiller’s offense look far more effective than it really was. The best season Purdue had post-Drew was the 2003 season, where we had a tough, veteran defense combined with Coach Tiller “discovering” something called the running game. Sadly, Coach Tiller never learned from his successes that season, and engaged in a very lengthy panic to where Purdue’s offense continued to dwindle as it became ever-more reliant on the passing game. The more-of-the-same approach, that which worked before but became less effective as the conference overall changed, in turn caused the organizational culture to go stale as well.
Ultimately, Coach Hope’s on-field woes could most likely be attributed to the ongoing quarterback merry-go-round, combined with a poor choice of offensive strategy that was, again, too reliant on the pass. In so many games, I observed too many over-engineered plays that were attempted to be executed by under-skilled personnel. The nature of these plays tended to put the offensive players in too many precarious situations, which could account for why injuries perpetually plagued Hope and his team.
A run-oriented, option-based attack could have rectified this problem. So many fans argue that the passing game is what puts butts in the seats, but I counter in turn that winning is what truly generates enthusiasm for a program, and thus stimulates greater attendance. Three yards and a cloud of dust will sell just as well as the passing game, if you win. The new coach, whoever he may be, will be well-served to heed this advice. Given our current personnel, we could credibly execute a flexbone option attack much like Georgia Tech and Navy currently use. It could buy us time until we bring in personnel that could give us more options in a balanced, pro-style attack that is a proven winning approach with teams throughout the country.
But in the meantime, do not pile on Coach Hope. I will always admire him as a loyal, gracious man. He stood for everything a place like Purdue should support — values, character, sincerity, and integrity. The Boiler Nation would be well-served to never forget that.