Yeah, that seemed pretty fair to Purdue and maybe even a little optimistic about the state of the football program. The NYT takeaway seems to be that Purdue is a stable institution in a wealthy league, but that stability sometimes discourages financial innovation.
This sentence really jumps out at me: "Purdue has resources. It’s just sitting in a conference full of schools that have more, including in its own state." I don't know if that's necessarily true with respect to Indiana, but I do know that Purdue has run the smallest or close to the smallest athletic budget in the B1G for at least the past 30 years.
Maybe the combination of greatly increased tv revenue and Cignetti's overnight success at Indiana will compel Purdue to rethink its financial approach to football. Or, maybe we'll have this exact same discussion in another two or three years at which point the program will have fallen even further behind.