Sunday Morning Coming Down // Week 7

Purdue Drinks Your Milkshake

By GoForThree Oct 17, 2021, 8:59am CDT

Ten B1G Things

Purdue has won 4 of their last 5 against Iowa
Purdue hadn’t beaten a #2 ranked opponent on the road since Notre Dame in 1974
Given his 75% completion rate, Aidan McConnell will not be joining the list of QBs “broken” by Iowa
Iowa scored its fewest home point total since 2012 and suffered its largest home loss margin since 2013
Looks like it’s OSU for the playoff or nothing for the old B1G Ball Club
Surely Iowa fans will argue to the contrary, and tell us that a horrendous loss to Purdue should not a playoff run derail
Indiana held the nation’s leading rusher to 82 yards and lost
Army’s backup QB had a better passing day than Wisconsin’s Graham Mertz, completing 5/6 at 14.5 yards per completion
On the plus side, Mertz finally had a game with no interceptions
Seems like an Old Brass Spittoon should become the property of the losing team
Find a team with more quality losses than Indiana (aside from the whole SEC of course)
Schiano’s Rutgers defense giving up 1,531 yards in three games really brings back memories of Iowa and Purdue for me
Nebraska has 5 losses by a combined 28 points
Tennessee fans pelted Ole Miss cheerleaders with objects from the stands, continuing the time-honored southern tradition of hitting women

The Rundown

Purdue at Iowa | A Good Old Fashioned Harboring, 24-7

BoilerUp89: They say when you have 2 QBs you actually have 0 QBs. But 3 is 1 more than 2 and since Purdue played 3 QBs on the same drive, they did in fact have 1 QB today (yes that’s my engineering degree hard at work). Purdue played well on offense against a good Iowa D - major props to David Bell who should win the prestigious OTE POTW after that 240 yard receiving performance. 24 points with 10 points left on the field (a goal line fumble and missed FG) is a good all around performance by the offense. But perhaps more importantly, this Purdue defense deserves some major appreciation for their turnaround from last season. Purdue has only given up 84 points on the year - 2nd in the B1G (just 1 more point than Penn State). The new defensive staff deserves big raises and the players should all be recognized for putting in the work to improve. Brohm has a coaching staff in place to do really good things if they can keep them at Purdue. One final thought before I rewatch the game and check out the basketball scrimmage notes: my favorite graphic during the game was when they showed that Purdue had 8 wins all time as an unranked team against AP #2 ranked teams - 4 more than any other program. Well now that number is 9, and Jeff Brohm continues to have active winning streaks against Iowa & OSU. Choo choo! Bring on the striped skunks of Wisconsin.

Stewmonkey13: Turns out Iowa really isn’t the #2 team in the nation. Who knew? Oh right, just about everyone. Everyone with half a brain has been saying the turnover rate combined with the shitty offense isn’t a sustainable combination for winning. Quite true! When the reversion happens and Iowa can’t get turnovers and short fields this offense sucks out loud and simply cannot score points at a P5 level. And while Petras certainly isn’t great, this is much more of a structural issue that just isn’t getting fixed. Defensively, Iowa plays a soft zone, and expects their CBs to make plays one on one. Turns out David Bell is good. You’d think Iowa would have learned that from the previous two meetings he torched them, but then you’d be expecting Iowa to make adjustments, which they just don’t do. Kudos to Purdue for scratching where it itches. Iowa is still the same team playing mostly the same way.

Michigan State at Indiana | Balancing the State of Indiana’s Football Outcomes, 20-15

Abdominal Krampski:

HOOOOOOCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC ptoo

I’m not going to look a road-conference-win-over-strong-defense in the mouth too much, but this is the second game in the last month where Michigan State’s seen its offense be completely deactivated by an opponent for an entire half. It’s something of a credit to the improvement the defense is making that the Spartans nonetheless won both those games, but the beat drops on the schedule after the bye. The defensive progress most likely isn’t going to be enough to hold the division heavyweights to 15 or 20 points. Ergo, they have to figure out how this low-ceiling offensive line will deal defenses with good talent up front, or even a remarkable overachieving season will feature losses to Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State and feel kind of hollow.

Also, penalties are still a big problem that really needs to improve - 12 for 134 this week. The Spartans aren’t the Raiders, or prime Miami, to be able to afford that many mistakes, even if quite a few were crap calls.These are all concerns for the bye week, though. In the meantime, big credit to the special teams for coming up nails for the most part, and for a lot of contributors up and down the depth chart chipping in just enough to get away with that first half of offense - and, hey, to cover the number as well (as great teams do).

BuffKomodo: What in the serious hell. Indiana has lost yet another game because of the egregious errors on offense. The defense gave up 13 points to a top 10 team. The offense scored only 15 AND GAVE UP 7 OF THEIR OWN. At this point, I don’t believe that Sheridan or Hiller need to be on staff next week, and next week will be absolutely awful. I’m so angry and upset for this defense. They deserved better. Maybe we’ll make a bowl but it’s not looking good.

Nebraska at Minnesota | Row’d the Corn, 30-23

WSR: All right, it’s been a few hours and I’m still frustrated.

Minnesota repeatedly shot themselves in the foot, from failing to come up with an answer to the very tall and therefore talented Austin Allen to Tanner Morgan throwing a couple really bad picks on plays that could have been made (one of which should have been a TD if he threw it to Mike Brown-Stephens earlier) to Mike Sanford picking a terrible time to call a trick play on what should have been another TD drive after going through the Huskers like shit through a goose on the 1st two drives to Fleck choosing to go into a shell YET AGAIN after the 2nd pick and playing completely risk-averse football against the worst team on the Gophers schedule.

I can hear you saying “Wait, didn’t Minnesota win?” Well of course we did.

Scott Frost is a mouthbreathing idiot. But for this to only be a one-score game is absolutely unacceptable. We’ll need to play better for the entire game to beat Maryland next weekend. Stop playing with your food, Fleck. That’s how you lose to Bowling Green and make Nebraska look competent.

Dead_Read: We have another entry in the season-long exploration of self-defeat. Lovely.

Questions: Why does Nebraska continue to make mental mistakes? Why hasn’t their play improved in the crunch? Why does the fourth-year starting quarterback look befuddled when he is standing in the pocket?

Answer(s): Ineffectual coaching and a poorly run enterprise.

This should not be happening in year four, and I hope Trev Alberts is exploring all avenues to change the trajectory of the program.

BigRedTwice: Ugh. I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite see this coming. I’m neither an idiot nor a Pollyanna, so I knew Nebraska’s worst tendencies might not have been exorcised for good, but I liked the trajectory they were on the last two weeks.

But this felt like the Week Zero team that fcked around and let Illinois get a conference win. I didn’t need to see that team ever again, but here we are.Frost has succeeded in getting Nebraska close in games. But his legacy appears as though it’s going to be defined as being absolutely unable to win the gimmie games.

Rutgers at Northwestern | Rutgers remains an unspeakable embarrassment, 21-7

MNW: Northwestern beat a very, very bad Rutgers team.

They did that in spite of some of the most baffling playcalling I’ve seen from Pat Fitzgerald in quite a while (the random number generator on 4th down is fun), an almost pathological commitment to charging Evan Hull right into the line over and over, and a bevy of stupidity and shenanigans. These were two of the worst teams in the Big Ten hitting each other with wrenches and calling it football, and...well, Northwestern won. Ryan Hilinski is Fine, Actually, Stephon Robinson Jr. is Good, and there’s a swagger to Brandon Joseph that is lost on this team.

3-3 (1-2). Topside for maybe the last time this season.

Onto Michigan and the George Jewett Trophy.

LPW: We’re not the worst! Thank god we beat Rutgers. As MNW alluded to earlier, this might be the high point of the season. Next week Michigan is going to kick our ass and take home the Jewett trophy.

Army at Wisconsin | Wisconsin hates the troops, 20-14

Wisconsin only survived this game because Army once again lacked their injured starting QB. With Christian Anderson under center, the Badgers would’ve been done in. Frustrating to watch all around, knowing what could have been. Cue the crying about knees.