As we saw at the end of last season, Purdue played Auburn in the Music City Bowl. It wasn’t a very pretty showing, as they lost that one 63-14. It seemed as if the Boilers couldn’t catch up to the speed presented by the Tigers. The big question watching the Vanderbilt/Purdue game today is if they can catch up to their speed?

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand Vanderbilt isn’t a world beater out of the SEC. However, it’s not like Auburn was last year either. For this Purdue team to take the next step under Brohm, they need to show that they can match the speed of the teams around them. The biggest key was stopping the running game of Ke’Shawn Vaughn.

For the first half, Purdue did a fairly decent job of that. Vandy’s longest play from scrimmage was 49 yards. Outside of that, the defense held Vandy to 200 total yards of offense. In the second half of the game though, it seemed like the Purdue game plan started to stall again like it did last week at Nevada.

Though it seems as if Elijah Sindelar is finally consistently finding his groove, it looks as if the Boilermakers are finding the speed and specialists that are needed to win games against the top tier teams that they would like to compete with.