As I’m sure you all know by now, in the least surprising move of the newly minted offseason, Purdue parted ways with second-year head coach Ryan Walters in the most boring and logical way possible. After all the chants, message board rants, and percentage parsing, Purdue and Mike Bobinski fired Walters on the Sunday after the last game of the season. The thing that was most likely to happen, happened the way it was most likely to happen, when it was most likely to happen.

Mike Bobinski heads into the offseason with the fate of Purdue football in his hands. One way or another, this will be a legacy-defining hire for Purdue’s athletics director. I’m sure, in the next few days, there will be rumors, innuendo, and at least one mention of both Jon Gruden and Art Briles. There will be hot takes, lists, counter-lists, lists of people who make good lists, and finally, lists of people who make good lists of people who make good lists. Bobinski will be both pressured to both take his time and hurry up. In the end, he’ll do what he thinks is best and we’ll live with the consequences. I hope he gets it right, but I don’t even know what that means exactly.

I can assure you, anything you hear from me is pure speculation. I don’t know anyone, I don’t know anyone who knows anyone, and if I did, I wouldn’t be leaking information that could potentially undermine the coaching search. I don’t begrudge anyone their strongly held opinion, but I’ve covered a few of these things, and they tend to devolve into factions. Those factions decide who they want for a head coach, and if those demands aren’t met, they take it out on the new head coach until proven otherwise. Honestly, Purdue’s transition from Brohm to Walters, in terms of fan support, went smoother than most I’ve seen. My hope is that Purdue fans are able recreate that with this coaching staff. I know y’all got burned with Walters, but the good news is that I doubt the next hire could be any worse in terms of on field results.

When I was living in Manhattan and writing about Kansas State, my first order of business after the hiring of Chris Klieman was to ask everyone to please put down their pitchforks and extinguish their lanterns until the “no-named guy from North Dakota State who is friends with the A.D.” coaches a game. It took the folks in Manhattan a few seasons and a Big 12 Championship, but I don’t think they’d be willing to trade Klieman for many other head coaches. Despite a disappointing end to the Wildcats’ 2024 season, it looks like Kansas State athletics director Gene Taylor nailed his legacy hire.

Hiring a college football coach can be a shot in the dark. Throw in the rapidly changing nature of college football in general, and while I’d enjoy Mike Bobinski’s paycheck, I don’t envy his job at the moment. He has to hire a coach without knowing what the sport is going to look like five years down the road. I’m going to do my best to keep an open mind through the search process. There’s no road map for success, especially considering we don’t even know what the road looks like up ahead.

Fran Brown led Syracuse to a 9-3 season after coaching Georgia’s wide receivers in 2023. Rhett Lashley has S.M.U. in the ACC Championship, but in 2017 he was in the middle of leaving Auburn’s O.C. job for the same position at UConn. Predicting which college coach will hit big and which ones will fail is a fool’s errand. If it were easy, I wouldn’t be writing this article.

Like I said above, I have no idea about what’s going to happen over the next few weeks regarding the Purdue coaching search, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who says they do. All I know for certain is Purdue will hire a football coach and field a team in 2025. I’m going to have plenty to write about over the next nine months, no matter how this shakes out.