100th Bucket game is Purdue's last chance to prove 'other side of the bridge' nears

WEST LAFAYETTE — Purdue football linebacker Mani Powell left behind 10-win potential to conclude his career as part of a new beginning.

Powell might have been an all-conference player for UNLV, which takes a 9-2 record into its season finale. The Boilermakers own the flip side of that record entering Friday’s daunting finale against No. 2 Indiana.

Powell said his lone season in West Lafayette has been a fulfilling one in every way other than that record. The true payoff may come after he has moved on to the next stage of his life. This team’s legacy will be defined by what foundation it set for better seasons ahead — a mission in which this Old Oaken Bucket game can still play a part.

“Coach just keeps telling us keep axing at the wall until we get through to the other side,” Powell said. “That’s what we’re doing — we're treating it as if we’re going to keep digging for our win.

“We’re going to go out there and give everything we’ve got to finish the right way and start the turnover — the other side of the bridge for the next guys that come in here, to show them we’re trying to change something.”

Maybe neither coach Barry Odom nor Powell meant the “axing the wall” metaphor to sound like the description of a prison break. Hard to argue it’s not an apt one, though. This group was asked to, at least by reputation, serve time for crimes it did not commit.

That included the 66-0 collapse in Bloomington last season. IU reclaimed the Old Oaken Bucket with the most lopsided margin of victory in Purdue history.

As of Monday night, the No. 2 Hoosiers were a 28-point favorite to win Friday night and complete an undefeated regular season. That makes the Boilers 28-point underdogs to win their first Big Ten game in two seasons.

The only wider points spread in IU’s favor in the past 30 years? It came last season, when it was a 29-point favorite, per the Odds Shark database.

Success in the Old Oaken Bucket Game partially defines any Purdue coach’s tenure. Walters only coached in two of them, won the first, but experienced a calamitous disaster in the second and was out of a job the next day.

Curt Cignetti arrived in Bloomington and moved the goal post on how IU’s biggest rival will be judged. For the present and likely the near future, Odom will not be asked merely to beat the Hoosiers. He must topple a giant — in this case a team on a rocket ship to the Big Ten championship game and at worst a second straight trip to the College Football Playoff and probably an on-campus opener.

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All of this contributes to the backdrop of Friday’s game, which is where Odom should and apparently will leave it. He said he discussed the history of the rivalry — Friday’s 127th edition being the 100th meeting for the Old Oaken Bucket. He challenged his team to rise to the “responsibility” it bears in that succession.

“We’ll all go down as we leave this game as a win-loss record versus your rivalry,” Odom said. “That’s been the focus of what we’ve talked about and how we need to go focus to play our best.”

Purdue played far from its best in its last game, a messy, undisciplined 49-13 loss at Washington. The idle week gave Odom and staff two weeks to put everything into this finale.

It might sound hard to appeal to the historical importance of a rivalry to which most of this transfer-heavy roster has no connection. Some of those players will participate in their only installment of the series Friday.

To them, the game represents the last chance to show they fulfilled their widely stated goals — to leave the program in a better place than they found it, and to begin building toward the next chapter of Boilermaker success.

“I think (Friday) is huge, with it being the last game,” said receiver Michael Jackson III, who will conclude a career which included stops at USC and Georgia. “We really want to carry that momentum in for next year.

“This is the biggest game of the year for us. A win over IU would be tremendous for the turnaround of this program.”

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This whole conversation follows the same unfair theme of this season. Almost none of the coaches and players responsible for 66-0 in Bloomington last season remain in the program.

At the same time, this season represented a new start, a clean break, a quick check-out from last season’s rock bottom residency. Purdue likely needs to check any one of a long list of prerequisites before it topples the No. 2 team in the country. Odom, though, must prevent this competitive gap in the rivalry from widening into a chasm.

That sort of chasm — the one with IU dictating terms so harshly — has never existed in the modern history of the program.

Indiana won every meeting of the Darrell Hazell era. The last, after Hazell had been fired at midseason, was decided by two points.

Prior to last season, of the Hoosiers’ last 13 victories in the series dating back to 1990, nine came by seven or fewer points. In the same span, Purdue posted eight victories of 27 or more points.

The last back-to-back IU victories by emphatic margins came nearly 40 years ago. The Hoosiers followed up a 35-14 victory in 1987 with a 52-7 thumping at Ross-Ade the next season.

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To be fair, speaking of history, some aspects of this game are historically unique. This marks only the third Bucket Game against a top-five IU team. The others came in 1945 and 1967.

In a two-year span IU leapt from the losingest program in NCAA history to one which could enter the playoff as the No. 1 seed.

Odom did not help create that challenge. Nonetheless, it underlies what counts as progress at Purdue. That project begins Friday.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Purdue vs IU football preview: Barry Odom turnaround needs to show progress