Care: Peacock

Let's get this out of the way early: barf. I have Peacock already so it wasn't an access issue for me. But the coverage was terrible. The commentators were incorrect at least a dozen times over the course of the game. They were calling players the wrong name, incorrect when referencing the current drive/last drive, calling poorly thrown balls great passes, and generally just not good at talking about simple observations which is their job. The camera quality was fine but they literally didn't show replays of most major plays and when plays were under review they either didn't or waited until the last second. Generall a poor experience and I'm glad we're done with ours for the year.

Don't Care: Case of the Dropsies

This was not the game to watch if you were scouting our receivers. I don't know how many official drops we had but it wouldn't surprise me if it was at least six. Most were surprisingly on Harrison. The weather was clearly a factor but a lot of the dropped passes were routine catches any other week. This was likely an exception to the rule and if there was any coach to trust will fix an issue, it's Hartline. I feel bad for McCord becuase his day would have been unbelievable if this passes were caught.

Care: Rushing Game Reality

A few things from today - Hayden is as good as ever, we gave him a number of big rushing lanes to get chunk yardage, and we wisely implemented a number of new looks to keep the defense guessing. Hayden is a great back and we knew that. He may be our second best rusher. Hopefully we only need to use him twice more so we can see him for two years after this season. Day and company did a great job putting some new wrinkles on the field today and clearly it threw Purdue for a loop. Our linemen looked great through 2.5 quarters until we called the dogs off. Either the concepts were easy to execute or they were more in line with their capabilities. All that being said, Purdue isn't a good team. People will insist Hayden needs to be our guy and is by far the best. The truth is he's flashed brightly his whole career playing poor defenses. We just haven't seen him against top competition. It's likely we will soon which is great. But we need to temper the expectations after today because of the poor opponent. But it was a huge improvement overall and that was fun to watch.

Don't Care: For Purdue

This is petty but the bad juju of that stadium sucks (major injuries this time), their players acted like rockstars every time they did anything while down four scores, and looking good while beating them dies nothing for us. They are worthless. Good riddance.

Care: The Defense

It wasn't a great offense they were stopping, but boy did they stop them. The final numbers don't look as good as the defense looked today. They did a great job limiting this offense and the goal line stand that resulted in a missed FG was really great to watch. The LBs (Chambers) need to figure some things out and hopefully Burke isn't out for next week (that will legitimately cripple this defense). All around it was very fun to watch them play today and limit Purdue to even fewer points than their average.

Don't Care:... For McCord's awareness.

McCord has proven he's our QB1. But he has real issues that haven't improved so far. He is inaccurate for large stretches of games and was saved by some great catches today. He doesn't gonthroughnhis reads efficiently yet and will often throw to his first without seeing the field and throwing to someone very covered. He also does not have good pocket awareness (save for the one spin out on the long drop by Xavier). He doesn't step up in the pocket when it's open (the result was his fumble in one case), and he had how many Delay penalties today? He needs work and I know he's still young in terms of experience but those small mistakes will lose us the game next week if they aren't fixed. Do