Purdue head football coach Barry Odom
WHEN PURDUE FOOTBALL hires a head coach with experience (Jeff Brohm), winning follows. When they don’t (Danny Hope, Darrell Hazell, and Ryan Walters, most recently), the team, the university, and Boiler Nation all suffer.
So, when athletic director Mike Bobinski hired Barry Odom, 48, to be Purdue University’s 38th head coach, the program brought in a proven pro with the experience and the mindset.
“Coaching is teaching,” Odom says. “All the coaches have a responsibility to be great teachers.” Entering this season, Purdue has many reasons for a lack of success, but that’s not the narrative Odom wants surrounding this team.
Following last season’s 1-11 finish and Walters’ dismissal, nearly every starter entered the transfer portal, leaving the team decimated.
“With the number of players we’ve brought in, it will be our responsibility to galvanize them together. We have a lot of talent. Some players have experience, and some are first-year players, so we need to bond them as one,” Odom says.
The bonding and camaraderie will be key to any success Purdue enjoys on the field. Odom says he does not view this season’s brutal schedule as a negative but instead as a landscape of opportunity. The media pundits predict three or four wins, but the former University of Missouri linebacker has a different outlook.
“We choose to say we have opportunities, not challenges,” Odom says. “Nobody cares how many players left or stayed.”
Not every team is going to enjoy the fast success like Indiana and Curt Cignetti had last year, but Odom sees Purdue’s way back as more immediate than gradual over time.
“We are going to take [this season] one game at a time. The opponent every week is us. Your game opponent is a nameless and faceless team. We realize our margin of error is slim to none. We need to be a great situational team. All the simple parts of the game, tackling and blocking, those things need to be done in a winning process. I will not take a different approach. I’m excited about what this team can accomplish.”
Odom’s last season at the University of Nevada Las Vegas was considered the most impressive campaign in school history. His Runnin’ Rebels reached double-digit wins for only the third time in program history and finished the season at a program best No. 19 ranking in both the AP and Coaches polls, as well as its first-ever College Football Playoff ranking.
Odom possesses a 44-32 overall record for his head coaching career. His 19-8 mark with the Rebels bears significance in that the five seasons before his arrival (2017-22), UNLV won just 20 games. Impressively, his teams posted a 10-2 mark in true road games after the program only won eight total road games in the previous six seasons (8-25).
Moving from Las Vegas to West Lafayette might seem like the plot of a coming-of-age movie, but Odom and his wife Tritia, were born and raised in small towns in Oklahoma and Missouri, respectively.
“Obviously, these cities [Las Vegas and West Lafayette] are at opposite ends of the spectrum. There is only one Vegas in the world,” he says. “There is some familiarity in every place we’ve lived. Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve been blessed by being surrounded by great people. West Lafayette feels like home. Feels very familiar.”
A former player at Missouri from 1996 to ’99, Odom reflects that his best memories come from the relationships he nurtured during that time. As a linebacker, he still ranks in the top 10 (No. 7) for tackles (362) and led his team to two bowl appearances, serving as captain his senior year.
“I enjoyed the locker room, the camaraderie with teammates. It was a unique fraternity—a bond forever,” Odom says. “Some of my closest friends and best memories are from those locker rooms.”
But now, his “wonderful family”—25 years of marriage and three kids who are “happy and healthy, and they look and act like their mother”—serve as his inspiration and solace away from his coaching duties. But, he says, “I love really good food. I like golf, but don’t get to play much, and once a year we [the family] will find some time to get together where we end up on a beach—usually in the Florida Panhandle. We got to do that this year over Memorial Day.”
“There are always reasons for success or lack thereof,” Odom says. “At the very core of being a coach, the job is still relationship-driven. It’s developing lifelong relationships with the players where we have an opportunity to give them a platform for achieving success. From the moment I wake up, I’m trying to build the best team that I can.”
