Harbaugh rips poor facilities at Purdue

Submitted by Wolverine Devotee on

Harbaugh -- will do for visiting team "standard of care for the visitors" on multiple levels.....this is coming off Purdue game...

— angelique (@chengelis) September 25, 2017

Harbaugh "gamesmanship that is not sportsmanlike....locker rooms too small" no ac, no heat

— angelique (@chengelis) September 25, 2017

Harbaugh -- "gamesmanship should cease at the line of health and safety for the players"

— angelique (@chengelis) September 25, 2017

Harbaugh says it's not just Purdue, but he's absolutely blasting Ross Ade facilities. Said training table looked like it was from 1920s.

— Matt Pargoff (@MaizeBlueNews) September 25, 2017

Harbaugh wishes he had taken a picture of injury table at Purdue.
"I mean, it looked it was from the '20s," had rips/tears

— Adam Biggers (@AdamBiggers81) September 25, 2017

Urban Meyer agrees that that "Absolutely" there should be a standard for visiting locker room facilities etc. for programs in Big Ten.

— Tim May (@TIM_MAYsports) September 25, 2017

Purdue owes @CoachJim4UM an apology. This is embarrassing.

— Hammer & Rails (@HammerAndRails) September 25, 2017

jmblue

September 25th, 2017 at 3:13 PM ^

Did Purdue use to have functional AC in the visitors' locker room?  I'm wondering if they've always been negligent about this, or if this was a calculated decision by the new staff to "make a statement."

LSAClassOf2000

September 25th, 2017 at 5:31 PM ^

This question is one I asked myself after I sat back and thought about this story a little more - I suppose if it was facilities thing and it simply was a repair that wasn't prioritized, then that's still on Purdue but shit happens, I guess - still a bit upsetting if you're the team, I would say. If that was calculated move, then someone needs to investigate that as it is dangerous. 

Maybe that's a dumb thought, I don't know. 

ATC

September 25th, 2017 at 3:34 PM ^

Embarrassment is actually having a/c but breaking on gameday..... Purdue athletic administration is inept. It's a fact they've been told (in writing and more than once) the need for mobile x-ray services (amongst other "contemporary" services, equipment and protocols) Bobinski needs to grow some balls and admit he/they fucked up, more than once. The fucker is overpaid and underperforming.... a monkey could do his job better... no disrespect to monkeys. He will end up finding fault with someone else. Bringing Purdue up-to-speed on the basics would be the equivalent of handing matchsticks to cavemen. Fuck-em. This situation was 100% preventable.

FA_Wolverine

September 25th, 2017 at 4:24 PM ^

Tim Brando is tweeting up a shit storm about Jim Harbaugh. He's blocking people left and right for calling him out on being a douche.

Michology 101

September 25th, 2017 at 4:55 PM ^

Some people were wondering how could Purdue get away with this for years without other visiting teams complaining. I think this unusual heat wave finally got Purdue busted and embarrassed.

The reason why they've probably been able to get away with penny pinching and avoiding installing a visitor's locker room AC system... is because it's seldom ever been this hot in late September.

Though the weather finally busted their asses for being cheap, but not having proper medical facilities and equipment is still kinda hard to fathom.

umchicago

September 25th, 2017 at 5:18 PM ^

PUs official response is that UM had members of the AD look at the facility back in July.  They also gave them a pamphlet that indicated there was no A/C.

For under $10k you could easily get a furnace and A/C for that space.  Why should the opponents have come up with that idea.  Hell, we will only play there every 5-6 years now.

PU also indicated that UM complemented their medical staff in the past.  Well, perhaps there were only minor dings.  Speight could have had a serious head/neck injury.

Guests shouldn't have to plan for proper facilities, the damn host should.

What a joke.

Year of Revenge II

September 25th, 2017 at 5:07 PM ^

Make schools have functional visitors locker rooms, or tell them they are off the schedule.  Tell Iowa to take their pink locker room and jam it up their aaarrrsh.  Fix it or we'll find a replacement.  This is football, not interior decorating competitions.

Fire Jim Delaney.

Please relocate Brady Quinn.

charblue.

September 25th, 2017 at 6:44 PM ^

BTN played up the new football facilities at their school. And then afterward, you get the media reaction to the game from outside the lockerroom because everybody on camera is sweating their ass off. The players don't care. For the players, this is like standard conditions from the time they even were dressing onsite for an away game.

Yeah, the conditions are a bit different than Jerry's World in Dallas. But I mean going from that to a high school lockeroom setting whenever is hard to fathom, especially when every Big Ten school is like touting its facilities as a draw for its own athletes. So, yeah, what are you doin, just like improving bathroom facitliies for your team and giving the opposiion pit toilet conditions. What, you had to call the local contractor for temporary toilets just so you can claim we offered an offeseason visit visa to our opponents to suggest how we could improve our facilitiies.

Wnen our starting qb has to go off campus to get an x-ray to see whether the late hit from the douchebag Dlineman who hit him when he had no chance to protect himself, the issue comes down to, oh well, that's the breaks.

charblue.

September 25th, 2017 at 6:57 PM ^

like how you can improve the home team's chances of wnning, the issue is offering equal value accommodations. Not saying the visitors have to be given the same level of amenities, but the basics of league detrmination ought to be providec. 

Amd OK, given temperature conditions, do we care what color teams wear even if a choice exosts? My concern is player safety and whatever promotes it.

J_Dub

September 25th, 2017 at 7:02 PM ^

1)  Does PU's home locker room have A/C?  Don't think I've seen that discussed.

2)  It seems like an easy rule to implement (but harder to enforce) is requiring the same functional standard for a school's home and away locker room.  Obviously the devil is in the details but something like heat or a/c would obviously be covered by that.  Might not have a pretty visitors locker room, but it would have to function the same.  If PU doesn't want to pay for A/C, then the home locker room would also not be allowed to have it.

michfan23

September 25th, 2017 at 7:38 PM ^

I think we can all agree that Purdue acted shamefully with their accommodations and in their conduct. The targeting penalties, the non call on the Speight hit, the cheap antics of their coaching staff, and the lack of modern locker room facilities are telling to the character of their football program. Michigan plays in the Big Ten, clearly there is enough money going to every school for there to be ac in the locker room and a training table that is acceptable. If Purdue doesn't want to adhere to proper sportsmanship or facilities then they can leave the most profitable conference in all of college sports.

That being said, do I expect the do nothing commissioner to get involved? Nope.

KungFury

September 25th, 2017 at 8:04 PM ^

I was flipping through and stopped when I saw harbaughs presser on the finebaum show where Paul and some moronic woman he had on the show laughed at how petty harbaugh was thinking that he should be comfortable in a visiting locker room. Basic safety for the players sailed wayyyyy over their heads..

michfan23

September 25th, 2017 at 8:09 PM ^

You're right, not surprising. The SEC crowd that Finebaum caters to don't typically have much brain matter in which to process information, much less multiple viewpoints.

After living in the South for the last 6 years of my life, I'll just say that there seems to be a lot more stupid down here than in Michigan. I won't get into the reasons for this, but I don't have much respect for the SEC or the education of many.

BlueMk1690

September 25th, 2017 at 8:59 PM ^

I think the whole episode just kinda shows where Purdue is as a football program. I mean you look at their stadium and facilities in general and let's face it, this isn't the level of say the top 8-9 programs in the Big Ten. This is closer to the mid-majors than to Michigan or Ohio State.

And really Purdue *never* has been that good. There's just no track record of sustained success. It's weird because if you're like me and started following college football in the Tiller era, you'd have thought of them as kind of a decent football school, 2nd tier in the conference. But in reality their history is one of brief spurts of moderate sucess among long stretches of futility. In a 120 years of Big Ten participation these guys have been to two Rose Bowls separated by 30+ years. They have won 10 games once. Once. 38 years ago.

They're like a worse Minnesota without historic glory. And that's reflected in their fanbase too. I remember even in the Tiller years it wasn't that easy to actually find Purdue football fans on the internet because there just wasn't that big fan community like you get with the bigger Big Ten teams. The fans that you do get with teams like that are often somewhere between apathy and a seething resentment toward their betters. They do taste the hint of success a little too often to be kind of 'aw shucks, let's at least have a good time'.

Now if you're a new coach like Jeff Brohm and you come into a place like that after a bad spell, your first thought is that you gotta change the culture. So you're going in there guns blazing, it's a new world, you're intense, you're a winner. These guys better get used to a new wind blowing here. So that's where you get a D that's playing dirty because they think that's intensity. It's what happens when you preach about the 'streetfight between the whistles' non-stop and try to tell your team in so many ways that they shouldn't lay down to expect defeat. It's easy to lose control because your team literally hasn't been there before. And you'll be reluctant to rein it in as getting some guys ejected and lots of penalties is still better than the apathy and expectation of losing you're trying to purge.

What you also are tempted to do is tomake the resentments of the fanbase your own. Mark Dantonio did this 110% at MSU. No doubt he already had some negative feelings toward Michigan from his spell at OSU but he doubled down on it. When he came to MSU he didn't curb their dirty tendencies or resentment, which had already spiralled out of control a few times under his predecessors, he cultivated it.

Now Jeff Brohm doesn't have the luxury of having a bogeyman come every year. Purdue are easily the biggest losers of the conference alignment as there are no teams of relevance to them in the West. All the teams they sort of care about are in the East. But I probably wasn't the only one to sense a certain pettiness, a certain petulance and chippiness about him and his staff on Saturday. And it's because in that moment they realized what being Purdue is..you get these goons from Michigan coming into your stadium and you know what they're ranked 8th but you can tell they aren't *that* great. Your team's improved, you're giving it a shot and they aren't blowing your guys away, they aren't an unstoppable machine.

But somehow they end up winning by 3 scores anyway. And that's that. Meanwhile you haven't got much else to look forward to this year. Certainly no game that allows you to get up like that. Remaining home games..Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois and Indiana. You don't get many chances at Purdue to get that 'big home game' on network TV vs a big name highly hyped opponent and you typically blow those rare chances. And then you're back in obscurity again in your second rate digs with your second rate fans. And somehow you feel that a Jeff Brohm isn't gonna make a Mark Dantonio type run there, he's gonna either fail or be off to bigger and better things after a good year or two.

Yeoman

September 26th, 2017 at 12:52 AM ^

They were really good towards the end of his tenure--top ten three years in a row, beat #1 twice in three years, four straight years with somebody in the top 3 for the Heisman (Griese, Leroy Keyes, Phipps). And they beat Michigan five years in a row (and it would probably have been six but we were off their schedule in '67).

I'm not fond of the 10-wins stat when people are looking back that far. It was a much higher bar back when teams only played ten in a season. Or even nine. Michigan only won ten games once between '05 and '71.

I guess I have the same problem you do, only more so. You came in during the Tiller years; I came in just in time to see Griese and Keyes. Until recently they had had just enough success since to keep some of the luster, for me. It's hard to think of them as being in the same class as Indiana.