These Boilermakers See the Big Picture

Two years ago, when Purdue played USC in its season opener, Coach Joe Tiller took his players to the Rose Bowl and had them photographed on the field.

But even the optimistic Tiller couldn’t have envisioned returning so soon as a participant in the Jan. 1 game he reveres enough to call “the granddaddy of them all,” with no hint of cynicism.

“As a youngster growing up in Ohio, I always dreamed of this,” said Tiller, whose team shared the Big Ten title with Michigan and Northwestern but won the Rose Bowl berth because it had defeated the Wolverines and Wildcats.

“To have an opportunity to coach in it and take a team to it is something of a dream come true. It’s something I could never have imagined.”

Tiller, 33-15 in four seasons with the Boilermakers, traced his team’s turnaround to a 32-31 comeback victory over Michigan at West Lafayette, Ind., on Oct. 7. The Boilermakers, 3-2 and unranked, trailed the sixth-ranked Wolverines, 28-10, at halftime and missed a chance to tie the score with 6:45 to play when a two-point conversion failed.

However, Purdue’s defense, which had given up 351 yards in the first half, held firm under intense pressure and the Boilermakers regained the ball. Travis Dorsch missed a go-ahead field goal with 2:11 left but converted a 33-yard attempt with four seconds to play.

“That started a great run for us in October,” Tiller said. “All four teams we beat [Michigan, Northwestern, Wisconsin and Ohio State] are in bowl games.”

The 14th-ranked Boilermakers (8-3) have been practicing twice a day, forced indoors by cold weather. The team will arrive in Southern California on Saturday, and Tiller plans to reduce the schedule to one practice a day.

“Once we get to the site, we’ll spread out and let the guys spend all their per diem in the first 48 hours,” he said. “We’ll actually have scrimmage-type situations and try to go into a game week like any other game week.

“I think our team is a little more mature than the team we took to Tampa [for a 28-25 overtime loss to Georgia in the Outback Bowl last New Year’s Day]. I like our work ethic. We learned a lot a year ago, and we hope the team embraces that and doesn’t forget it. We do feel we started well and forgot to finish, and that’s something we’ve talked about a lot.”

That defeat made one word--”finish”--become the team motto.

“Whether it was winter conditioning or a two-minute drill or situational type of stuff, we just kept that in mind,” said quarterback Drew Brees, third behind Florida State’s Chris Weinke and Oklahoma’s Josh Heupel in the Heisman Trophy voting. “You look at a lot of our games this year, and they went down to the fourth quarter, and we were able to finish.”