As Purdue gets ready to take on a 2-6 Michigan football team Saturday, let's take a minute to thank Boilermakers' coach Joe Tiller for being such a great role model.
As the father of small children, parents like me try to teach their kids to leave things as they found them -- visit someone's house and play with their toys, make sure you put the toys where they were when you started.
Well, Tiller took over a lousy football program at Purdue and he's leaving a lousy one behind. In the middle, he coached Purdue to 10 bowl games in 12 years, including a Rose Bowl. Thanks for that. But what happened the last five years or so?
Purdue hasn't beaten a Top 25 teams in years. It hasn't won a game in November -- other than to beat Indiana -- in years. It's late season collapses now, however, are all lost in the early season collapse of this team.
To Tiller's credit, he brought the spread offense to the Big Ten that now is the standard offense in college football. But before his death, Randy Walker had done more with that same offense at Northwestern than Tiller and Purdue. While other coaches were helping the offense evolve, Purdue simply became predictable.
The saddest case in point is the performance of Curtis Painter this year. The senior quarterback, who the university's sports information office was pushing for a Heisman Trophy, has more interceptions than touchdown passes through eight games. Even the offense stuck in the mud during the Jim Colletto and Fred Akers eras were more interesting and more productive than this.
Tiller will leave as Purdue's most successful coach, but the disappointment is that things could have been so much better than they turned out. Whether it was a lack of imagination or a lack of energy, this program ran out of gas a long time ago.
No matter what Tiller has accomplished, he'll leave Purdue football just where he found it: losing and directionless.
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