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Western Michigan coach P.J. Fleck holds aloft game ball with his Broncos after their 22-21 win at Northwestern on Sept. 3.

(AP photo)

I am hearing a lot of buzz from Indiana way about how Purdue needs to do whatever's necessary to hire a big-name coach. Somebody who'll make a big brand splash. Somebody who'll move the needle of public perception.

Somebody like Les Miles.

Which is total nonsense. What Purdue needs is to hire a charismatic and energetic young coach who knows what he's doing, knows the game, enough of an iconoclast to be creative but as much steak as sizzle.

Purdue needs a guy with enough positivity to will it out of the ditch it's in, enough knowhow to hook up the wench and enough audacity to believe he's the only one for the job.

That's not a 63-year-old Les Miles looking for one last gig before retirement. That's someone like 35-year-old P.J. Fleck at Western Michigan.

You can look at Purdue's last two choices and see what not to do. The just-fired Darrell Hazell I identified as a bad hire from the start. He basically crafted an 11-3 season in his second year out of predecessor Doug Martin's recruits. He had no other head coaching experience. He got undue credit from six years as a Jim Tressel assistant at Ohio State.

I remember him making some puzzling decisions in his last game at Kent State, a 44-37 loss to Northern Illinois in the Mid-American Conference championship and thinking: This guy might have gotten credit for resurrecting a MAC school, but he's no strategic genius. He's no in-game manager. He'll be in over his head at a Power Five locale.

He reminded me of the football version of Stan Heath, a guy who got the credit for largely someone else's toil. And he has been.

The Purdue coach before Hazell was Danny Hope, the handpicked successor that legendary Boilermakler innovator Joe Tiller basically negotiated into the job in his exit plan. Here was a man with no head coaching experience and merely a connection to a glorious past. Hope was a placeholder, a favor to a savior.

So, people are relating the next hire to the last two and saying: "Don't do that again! Don't go cheap. Don't hire a no-name from the MAC. Act like you're serious.

All of which is fine. But none of that addresses what you need most from a renovation specialist - the buoyancy of spiritual youth mixed with the expertise of experience.

Whether you like him or not, that's what Dave Joyner saw in James Franklin. He loved his unsinkable enthusiasm and recruiting track record and believed that his three years of head-coaching experience in the SEC, the nation's best conference, was enough to give him teaching and strategic chops. I was on-record as disagreeing with the choice for various other reasons. But I could totally understand Joyner's rationale. Even if you argued with his choice, you really couldn't with his reasoning.

But hiring somebody at the end of his career, basically just because he's a big name, to scour and reseed a toxic waste site like Purdue? That's a fool's mistake.

It's also been made by Purdue before, but so long ago that the lesson has been lost in the mist of history to most of the people making the decisions there now. In 1987, Purdue thought it would paint a bold stroke and hire a big name in recently deposed Texas coach Fred Akers who had twice (1977, 1983) led the Longhorns to the doorstep of the national title only to lose each time in the Cotton Bowl.

What Purdue didn't see was that Akers was on the back end of his career and really didn't have the energy reserve to take on a renovation project like Purdue. When a guy has been as close to the mountain top as Akers was at a marquee college football venue like Austin, it's unrealistic to expect him to suddenly make a go of it in a cornfield ghetto like West Lafayette.

The same holds true of Miles. He has already been to the pinnacle with Louisiana State. He's won a national title in the heart of the most fertile recruiting region in the nation (more abundant per-capita than even Florida, Texas or California).

Miles was never what you would call innovative or creative on offense at LSU; in fact, he's been the opposite. He basically just lines up his superior athletes across from yours and bets his'n kin beat youz'n. He's not getting those studs at Purdue, trust me.

Now, assuming you could even afford to hire him for at least $4-5 million annually - a real stretch at fiscally challenged Purdue - you're going to ask a 63-year-old to roll up his sleeves and try to recruit to the Basketball Belt in the most forlorn outpost in the Midwest? I don't think so.

No, Purdue is a young man's job. If this dysfunctional place had had the foresight and funds to buy out Hazell last year or had previous athletic director Morgan Burke not signed him to a ridiculous 6-year guaranteed contract in the first place, the Boilermakers could have hoped to nab Dino Babers from Bowling Green a year ago before Syracuse got to him. He'd even been an assistant there under Jim Colletto back in the early '90s. If you remember Babers as McDevitt-grad Matt Johnson's second boss at BG, you know what I mean.

Basically, Syracuse and Purdue are the same job - equally depressing places mired downwind of lake-effect overcast in economically challenged locales. The only difference is Syracuse is an urban pocket and Purdue is totally rural.

What you need in both places is a coach with a personal well of sunshine and the coaching acumen to turn marginal recruits into serious players. Babers was that guy at BG; you could hear it in his interviews and see it in his game-day countenance. He looked and sounded like a big-time coach even when he wasn't. That's why I made him my No. 1 Power Five-potential hire last December.

And he's a young 55 years old now, a guy who brings the chops of a dozen different FBS coaching stops with the ambition and hunger of a man still with something to prove.

See the Youtube video of his postgame victory speech after the Orange's upset of Virginia Tech on Saturday? This is a guy with more to prove and plenty of gas in the tank:

And that's the same energy you see in Fleck, the relative kid (35 years old) who is putting Western Michigan on the map now.

Look, I can get my fill of some of the over-the-top sloganeering and nonstop hype of some such guys. And I can't vouch for how genuine Fleck is. There've been unflattering stories written about him -- and many other coaches -- in that respect. In the often sleazy world of college football, the motto is: Let the recruit beware. Then again, in a place like northwest Indiana, you need the mindless, unabashed promotional skills of a crossroads Kia dealer.

Fleck has beaten Power Five programs with MAC players, whipping Illinois 34-10 and upsetting Northwestern 22-21 on the road just this year. The Broncos gave No. 5-Michigan State a real fight last season, losing just 37-24.

Fleck knows the turf at Purdue because he grew up an hour over the Illinois border in suburban Chicago and played at Northern Illinois. He can sell the fact that he's both played and coached in the NFL as a special teams maniac with the 49ers and a wideout assistant with the Buccaneers.

And he's built Western Michigan from a 1-11 first season into the MAC leader in four years - with his own recruits. He's constructed this thing from the ground up.

But the main thing is this: Fleck has some raised-fist, fight-the-power audacity in him. It's the same quality you saw in Lee Corso at another Big Ten football backwater Indiana four decades ago. You could see him getting into a verbal joust with Jim Harbaugh at a would-be post-game handshake: "---- me? No, ---- you!"

And that's what the Purdue job requires right now, a man who just does not give a damn.

Can you get Fleck for $3M per? Probably. He will be courted by other Power Fives. But now Purdue has the inside track because it's made its firing and can apply the full-court press to Fleck and his agent.

Certainly, he'll cost less than the potential outlay for Miles. But it's not what you pay, it's what you get.

This is the guy Purdue needs, not a sixty-something retread looking for a last landing spot before filing for Social Security. Hopefully, those at the school realize it.