One wonders if Purdue is what Robert Marve had in mind when he and his mouthy dad decided he could do better than Miami.
Sure, the program's produced Bob Griese and Drew Brees, but they were also 4-8 last year with a lot less upside than the Hurricanes. And somehow, all the flashier programs that the Marve camp were interested in as they hightailed it out of Coral Gables fell by the wayside.
Unless you ask an overjoyed Purdue coach Danny Hope. "We became a better football program today," he said in a statement. "His recruitment the last couple of months was a major story, not just at Purdue but nationally. He could have gone to any of a number of the best schools in the country." Like who, exactly?
Oklahoma State dropped him after defensive coordinator Bill Young took his opinion of Marve from Miami to Stillwater. Florida, LSU, and Tennessee were not allowed to communicate because of Miami's justified tampering-related transfer restrictions, and Tennessee was the only one that seemed that interested anyway. Were there others seriously in the mix? USF offered, but it boiled down to this: Marve would end up at the place where he had the least amount of competition for the starting job.
There's nothing wrong at all with wanting to start; in fact, the best athletes are driven and hungry. But there's lots wrong with thinking the job should be handed to you when you walk through the door. And that, along with off-field party antics that weren't helping him earn it at Miami, is Marve's problem.
Oh, well. It's too bad he didn't stay and battle it out with Jacory Harris -- both of them would have improved, and one could look to Tom Brady's 2008 stand-in Matt Cassell, who never started a single game at USC, or Miami's own stars Jim Kelly, Steve Walsh, Gino Toretta, Bernie Kosar, and Vinnie Testaverde to see how sitting the bench for a few seasons or biding time at backup doesn't come at the price of a career.
But Marve's gone, and so is his diva attitude. The shame is that he bailed rather than develop some character, and the hope is that he'll learn how it all works at some point, or even a long career may be cut short.
Sports
Now that Marve's off to the land of sweatshirts and corn, Janie Campbell would like to put Jacory Harris in a human hampster ball to protect him from injury. Her work has appeared in irreverent sports sites around the Internet.
