By Blake Dowson
Speaking in front of a large banquet hall full of reporters and other media members at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago on Monday, Purdue head football coach Darrell Hazell brought up a billboard sign that he often drove past in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The sign, he said, had the Boilermaker logo plastered on it with the words “The train is coming” prominently sprawled across the length of the advertisement.
For Hazell, who is potentially coaching for his job this season, that’s not exactly the message he wants to convey to his fans.
“The first year I saw [the sign], I said, It’s OK. The second and third year, I said, You know what, it’s starting to bother me a little bit,” Hazell said. “In the back of my mind, I said at some point in time the train has to get here. It has to arrive. That sign’s no longer there.”
The question, obviously, is whether that will prove to be true this fall with a Boilermaker team that finished a league-worst 2-10 with a 1-7 conference mark.
But Hazell — and the three Purdue players who joined him in Chicago — remained firm in believing that they will compete for the Big Ten West title in 2016.
Optimism is, and should be, high for each program in July, but there was a certain confidence that exuded from Hazell as he backed up his comments later in the day.
“I really feel like we’re there; I believe that,” he said. “That’s genuine. That’s not media-day rhetoric. I really feel like we have enough good players right now and that they’re starving to be successful. We think we can make a run.”
Senior defensive tackle Jake Replogle is one of the players Hazell mentioned most in his time in front of the microphone, and the honorable-mention all-conference player from a season ago echoed his coach’s beliefs on the urgency of the situation in West Lafayette.
“At some point, what needs to happen needs to happen,” he said. “I think this year is that year, where we will play up to the level that we know we can play at, and we have the players to do it. It’s just about guys making plays and playing up to their level.”
The optimism in the Purdue program is admirable, but the overwhelming consensus outside of West Lafayette is that 2016 will be another struggle for the Boilermakers.
The quarterback situation hasn’t been promising, and Hazell admitted there are around six running backs fighting for playing time right now.
If Purdue wants to make a splash this year, it will have to win games on the defensive side. The Big Ten West is a relatively defensive division, and there are bound to be plenty of low-scoring games.
Replogle, along with linebacker Ja’Whaun Bentley and the rest of the defensive unit, will have to keep opposing offenses in check. Other teams in the division have the capability of winning a game in a shootout. To put it frankly, the Boilermakers will not win a shootout game in 2016; they just don’t have the talent on the offensive side of the ball.
Bentley said the depth on the defensive side of the ball makes it possible for the Boilermakers to stymie opposing offenses, and he was adamant that the 2016 Purdue squad is nearing the final stop on its train track back to relevance.
“We have guys who are starting with in-game experience, we have guys who are second string who have in-game experience, and we have third-string guys with in-game experience,” Bentley said. “We have experience everywhere. With the experience of this team, with the leadership of this team, things have changed. This is not the same team that you saw in the past.”