Purdue’s Hope opens up about Marve’s success, assistants’ pay
By CLIFF BRUNT
ISL Editor
Purdue coach Danny Hope was very open during today’s press conference today. Two of his responses to questions jumped out at me the most.
First, his quote about Robert Marve:
“He’s playing really well. Playing very, very well. He has taken his game in spite, of the injuries and all the things that he’s been through, he’s ended up being the player that he should have been. It’s unfortunate he hasn’t played at this level for three or four years and then he could have maybe been an All-American player and we’d have won a lot more ballgames and it would have been a different type of success story. But he’s playing very, very well. He has done a better job of managing the game, managing the offense, has really been into it. He’s been an excellent leader. We say that all the time, guy is a good leader, guy is a good leader. He’s unique to me as a leader, this guy. He does it vocally, it does it by example. He just puts his heart into his game, plays the game with such passion that he raises the level of the play of the people around him. There’s some times that it’s been tight in some ballgames that Robert has stepped up there and rallied everyone up.
It’s nice to know that Marve, even for a little bit, reached that level. Hats off to him for finally winning coach Hope over.
Also, when asked about how the revenue that adding Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten could help Purdue, he said the following:
“Well, I think you take any facility that’s football related and you look at it that’s not an A+, then you make it an A+, and we have some facilities here that are A+. Our indoor facility is an A+. Our new practice fields are outstanding. There’s some other areas, I won’t earmark them now, but there’s other areas of our program from a facilities standpoint that are not an A+ yet. There’s still some below average and they’re not sufficient enough. Obviously from a compensation standpoint we’re way behind from assistant coaches’ salaries. We’re probably $300,000 or $400,000 behind, pool-wise next to last. We’re 12th in the Big Ten, hundreds of thousands of dollars, $300,000 or $400,000, and that really affects the program in a lot of ways. I feel like it had an adverse effect on Coach Tiller’s regime at the end. He wasn’t able to retain a lot of his top coaches. He’s a Hall of Fame football coach, and in the end he had some struggles maintaining the program at the level he would have liked to, and I think the fact that he couldn’t retain top coaches was a major factor in that. But it’s huge in the hiring process. You minimize or you limit the pool, the pool size. It’s difficult to hire coordinators when the assistant coaches don’t pay very much. Are your assistant coaches going to stay, or do they want to have to train people on an annual basis as coaches move in and out of the program. You can look and see where we’re at, and I’ve got files of information to show guys where we’re at. We’re a long ways away.”
Wow. That’s not the kind of honesty you normally get from a college coach. Sounds like someone who has nothing to lose. This statement puts a little bit more of the pressure on Morgan Burke. Not sure it was a strategic comment, but it certainly makes it look as though Hope hasn’t been dealt the best hand because he was crippled by financial limitations.
Here is a link to the AP story I wrote about coach Hope’s news conference on Tuesday: Purdue’s Hope has a lot on the line
