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Tommy McClelland didn’t even make it through his first week as Purdue’s athletic director before he had to walk something back. During his introductory press conference on Thursday, the guy just hired away from Rice decided to go off-script. That’s rarely a good idea, and it definitely wasn’t this time.
McClelland took a swing at Indiana, Purdue’s in-state rival, and it landed about as well as you’d expect.
“Every recruit and every student-athlete will hear this message repeatedly,” McClelland said. “We are here to win championships. If you don’t want to win championships, go to Indiana. Purdue may not be the place for you.”
Timing is everything, and McClelland’s timing here was rough. Indiana just finished an undefeated season and won its first national championship in football. Throw in the fact that Curt Cignetti’s Hoosiers are 2-0 against Purdue since he took over in Bloomington, with a combined score of 121-3 over those two games, and you can see why this didn’t go over well.
Indiana didn’t need any extra motivation heading into this fall. Now they’ve got a new athletic director from across the state basically daring them to run the score up again.
McClelland walks it back
To his credit, McClelland realized pretty quickly that he’d messed up. He addressed it the next day on “The Pat McAfee Show,” and didn’t try to spin it or pretend it wasn’t a big deal.
“I’m having a great day yesterday, giving our vision and sharing what we’re going to do here at Purdue,” McClelland said. “… I made an offhand, unscripted comment about an in-state rival that didn’t land well. I knew it the second it left my mouth.”
“We’re going to build programs here that are better at winning championships than I am at one-liners,” McClelland said.
He’s not wrong to want that overshadowing story gone. His actual message, building championship programs at Purdue, got buried under one bad joke.
Purdue has a long way to go
Here’s the thing though: talk is easy. Building an actual championship-caliber program at Purdue is a completely different challenge, especially given where the Boilermakers currently stand.
Purdue has gone a combined 7-29 over the last three seasons. That includes a brutal 3-24 record in Big Ten play, and Barry Odom’s first year on the job ended with an 0-9 mark in conference games.
So yes, McClelland’s comment was a bad look given the circumstances. But if he can actually deliver on turning Purdue into a program that competes with Indiana instead of getting run over by it, nobody’s going to remember one awkward soundbite from his first week on the job. Late November in this rivalry has been pretty lopsided lately, and that’s really the bigger story here, not a stray comment at a podium.
