Purdue takes a calculated risk on Ryan Walters
Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
In 2020, the Illinois defense was bad. Really bad. Their finest hour: holding Rutgers to a mere 20 points, the lowest total they allowed in eight games that season. Lowlights included surrendering 45 in the season opener against Wisconsin, which would go on to have back-to-back-to-back single-digit scores later in the season, and 56 in the season finale against Penn State, which hadn’t scored so much as 40 in its first eight games. The Illini finished 97th in points allowed per game, their fourth time placing worse than 90th across the last five seasons.
Two years later, they held opponents to 12.8 points per game, leading FBS for the first time since 19101.
Bret Bielema gets a lot of credit for the transformation Illinois underwent in 2022, but there’s a case to be made that Ryan Walters was the real key to their rebuild. His defense was already exceptional in his first year on the job—the Illini would’ve won nine games in 2021 if they had only scored 25 points per game—but the 20.2 PPG offense barely moved the needle after averaging 20.1 PPG the previous season. They barely stepped up to 24.2 PPG the next year, enough to reward that best-in-the-country defense with an 8-5 finish, but they would’ve gone 12-1 with just 25 points per game.
The only offense Walters couldn’t solve, Purdue, posted 31 points against his defense in the game that knocked Illinois out of their first AP ranking in over a decade. Now, he’s taken over from Jeff Brohm as the Boilermakers’ new HC, snapping up OC Graham Harrell and QB Hudson Card to run an offense that should be able to complement his defensive brilliancy a little more adequately.
I’ll go ahead and say it: Walters is far and away my favorite hire of the 2022-23 coaching carousel. Admittedly, that’s more a reflection on how many programs made absolutely bewildering choices or otherwise had glaring flaws in their selection process, but it’s also a statement about what a coup this feels like for Purdue. Walters is so overqualified that he could’ve easily sat around and waited for a more appealing market—one with, say, better jobs available out west, where he spent most of his life before putting down midwestern ties with his tenures at Missouri and Illinois. But he didn’t hesitate to sign on with the Boilermakers, a team that last reached the top 20 when he was a freshman at Colorado.
Walters sees something worth building in West Lafayette, a foundation laid by Brohm (19-25 in his first four seasons, 17-10 in his last two) that he can take a further step up from. His predecessor found success and brought the Boilermakers their first football title of any sort since the Drew Brees days—while largely eschewing defense and recruiting, the very fundamentals of football in their corner of the Big Ten. There are certainly questions about whether he’ll capture those aspects, as well as just how much his offense will be an improvement on the temperamental attacks he had to work with at Illinois. But the floor is allowed to be pretty low at Purdue, particularly if the ceiling can soar above the ten-win mark (which they’ve reached just once before, in 1979). And frankly, the best-case scenario feels closer to a fringe playoff contender in the twelve-team era. That’s what the Illini could’ve been last season with a consistently competent offense, and Walters could make it a reality across the conference at a fairly similar program.
The only remaining question: can he actually coach? For all his accolades, he’s never led a team at any level, and it’s hardly rare for elite coordinators to struggle in a role that is fundamentally rather different. Even for someone as accomplished as Walters, this does still represent a leap of faith for Purdue, as almost any coaching hire necessarily does. Making that leap after their first back-to-back winning seasons in Big Ten play since 1997-98 is a fairly chancy choice, considering there were more experienced (if less exciting) options available that would’ve fit the role well enough.
The Boilermakers are taking a shot at establishing themselves as a perennial contender, something that—if the series of callbacks to the 20th century in this article are any indication—they haven’t had a chance to do in quite a while. This is a risk, compared to the reasonably sustainable just-over-.500 future that a Matt Rhule or a Scott Satterfield could have provided. But in picking Walters, one of the most accomplished, ascendant coordinators in the game right now, they’ve stacked the odds heavily in their favor as they make one of the biggest gambles in program history.
The Last Five Years
It’s been two years now, but I still can’t get over how much people slept on 2021 Purdue. The Boilermakers won nine games for the first time in nearly two decades, and the record was hardly empty—they knocked off #2 Iowa and #3 Michigan State, and they bookended the year with understatedly impressive wins over Oregon State and Tennessee. The schedule was even tougher in 2022, and Purdue suffered forgivable losses to Penn State and Syracuse early, but a three-game winning streak to end the season was just enough to steal their first-ever (and the last-ever) Big Ten West title.
2022 and 2023
Barring a disastrous collapse, it feels like a solid passing game should be a given with both Hudson Card (8.6 Y/A, 6 TD, 1 INT last year at Texas) and Graham Harrell to oversee the offense. But the run game was rough—something that flew under the radar a bit because Purdue only trusted it enough to use rushing plays at the 13th-lowest rate in FBS, despite being in winning situations fairly often. Devin “Crazy Legs” Mockobee emerging as a surprise workhorse (and a solid receiving option!) was the group’s only saving grace, as the rest of the rushing corps averaged less than four yards a carry. The Boilermakers didn’t bring in much talent at the position, so they’re rolling with much the same lineup they had last season.
The defense sees a lot more transfer turnover, particularly up front. Weathers added a lot to the line, building up to the rotational style he preferred at Illinois. Against a similar lineup of physical Big Ten foes, it seems like just as good a fit for the Boilermakers as for the Illini. But his specialty is the secondary, and safety Cam Allen (49 tackles, 6 pass breakups, 3 interceptions) is just the man to place at the center of what’s hoped to be a quick turnaround. It’s easy to expect big things right away, given how rapidly Weathers transformed the defense at his last stop.
The Next Five Years
I asked a somewhat unusual question in my look at Tulsa’s hire of Kevin Wilson—or rather, Kevin Wilson’s choice of Tulsa—a couple months ago, and I think it fits here too. It seems more than obvious why Purdue would want someone on as meteoric a rise as Weathers has enjoyed…but why did he pick this program? Again, had he not built up a presence in the midwest across the last few years, an open job out in the Pac-12 or Mountain West would seem the more obvious choice.
Is it as simple as the Big Ten suiting his style better? Weathers has earned accolades from every coach he’s ever worked with, but his résumé went from intriguing to unbelievable at Illinois. The opponents he faced there, and will face at Purdue, are the sort that can wear an ill-prepared unit down with brute force, but the Illini’s historically brilliant defense only got better with time, culminating in a spectacular late-season performance in which they held Michigan to just 19 points2 and nearly pulled off a stunning upset. That resiliency plays more in this conference than any other, and it’s quickly becoming a hallmark of Weathers’ young career.
No hire is a guarantee. It would be an oversimplification to suggest somebody with HC experience would have been a sure thing in this role, particularly considering how scattered Purdue’s recent moments of success have been. But it’s always a shot in the dark picking somebody for their first job as a head coach, particularly in the Power 5, particularly following one of the most successful two-year runs in recent school history. The Boilermakers have weighed up the odds and decided it’s a risk worth taking, but only time will tell if they’ve done their math right.
Okay, I felt like just saying the year was snappier, but I can’t resist at least pointing out in a footnote that William Howard Taft was president, the South Pole hadn’t yet been reached, the Titanic had yet to launch, and sliced bread was still 18 years away from being invented.
That’s a Michigan offense which, if you recall, averaged over 40 points per game and scored more than 19 points in the fourth quarter alone the next week—when they were facing #2 Ohio State.