The way our fan base treated DH1 in those last few months made me embarrassed to call myself a Purdue football fan. This board was home to the worst of worst, blaming DH1 for every mistake, questioning his intelligence, taking everything good he did for granted, and childishly assuming that it all would get better as soon as he was fired. Where are those idiots now?
I question, however, whether he knew before the IU game? I recall that on Saturday morning of the Bucket game, it was common knowledge within the JPC that DH1 was done. But then the guy who sat next to me in RA at the time, whose son was on the team, was shocked when I told him what I'd heard, before the game. After the game, many of the coaches, including DH1, had their wives with them when they existed the field for the lockers, and there were a lot of tears, and they weren't tears of joy for just beating IU. I'll never forget, most of the wives just leered at the crowd gathered to watch the team file out of RA, with looks of pure contempt.
I certainly believe the part about MB taking the savings DH1 found and allocating them to another sport. Does anyone remember the name of the d-back coach JT hired back in about 2006 or 07, who was hired away by Wisconsin within days of Purdue announcing his hiring? I recall calling up to WL at the time and asking how we could let this happen, and I was told by an Associate AD that Purdue (i.e., MB) would not pay competitively for assistant football coaches with Wisconsin (and I assume MSU or about any other successful program) because we had lower football attendance than Wisconsin. In fact, he said something to the effect that we paid about 70% of what Wisconsin paid because our attendance was about 70% of there's. Think about that -- imagine if a company, that was half the size of its main competitor, told its professional engineers that it could only pay half the salaries. What sort of engineers do you suppose the smaller company would have, and what do you suppose the morale would be among them? And what would be the chances of ever growing that company's market share to catch the larger one?
Meanwhile, our football program did, at the time, produce the revenues to pay assistants competitively, but MB had come up with some goofy revenue allocation model -- not based in the reality of what it would take to keep football competitive -- that took precious resources away from football to subsidize non-revenue sports. This is why I've said for years, MB is not a businessman -- or not a good one, anyway -- he's a cross between an HR attorney (as he was at Inland) and a bad (i.e., short-sighted) accountant.
