Kenny Thompson

My summer book reading list included Mark Montieth’s “Reborn: The Pacers and the return of pro basketball to Indianapolis.” Montieth recalls in great details the early struggles to make the Indiana Pacers the premier team in the American Basketball Association. One of the original Pacers, Ron Bonham, could be a chapter in a book of…

The inevitable came three weeks early for Scott Frost, who got a $15 million going away present from Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts on Sunday. Alberts decided not to wait for a reduced buyout of $7.5 million on Oct. 1 after the 45-42 debacle in Lincoln last Saturday. On a day of upsets in college…

The Joe Tiller era at Purdue produced 52 players who went on to the NFL for at least one season. With all Tiller alumni except for Colts offensive tackle Dennis Kelly now out of the league, Purdue’s NFL numbers have been declining for years. An indictment, possibly, of the recruiting efforts of Tiller’s successors Danny…

Just how dominant has Ohio State football been in Big Ten Conference play since 2000? The Buckeyes have won 11 league championships or an average of one title every other season. Perhaps just as sweet to Ohio State fans, the Buckeyes are 17-4 against that team from up north, also known as Michigan. Even with…

“This is Dawson from Kansas City,” the recognizable baritone voice began his phone message on a fall morning in 1999. I was writing a weekly series of feature stories on former Purdue football stars for the Lafayette Journal & Courier’s Football Saturday publication back then. It was Notre Dame week and who better to talk…

Matt Painter likes to talk about wanting his Purdue basketball teams to get old and stay old. That’s been easier said than done for his football counterpart. In fact, Jeff Brohm’s 2019 Boilermakers had nine scholarship seniors on the roster. Five of them (future Cincinnati Bengals linebacker Markus Bailey, starting quarterback Elijah Sindelar, defensive tackle…

It is almost a certainty that Drew Brees will be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame the first year he is eligible in 2026. However, there’s a chance he won’t be the third Purdue passing star to be enshrined at Canton, Ohio. Long before Len Dawson and Bob Griese started their paths toward…

The 2022 Big Ten football media days are officially over and the hours of coach speak will be sifted for any nuggets of real information by fans and news organizations alike until the season opener Aug. 27 in Dublin, Ireland when Northwestern faces Nebraska. Illinois also hosts Wyoming that day but the focus will be…

Until reading “Perfect Warriors,” the story of the 1943 undefeated Purdue football team, I didn’t know Parke H. Davis from Fenway Park. Between 1869 and 1936, when The Associated Press poll was launched, there seldom was such a thing as a consensus national champion. Davis, a former player at Princeton in the early 1890s, took…

I’m not old enough to remember when the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles and the Giants departed to San Francisco from New York’s Polo Grounds. But last week’s news that USC and UCLA were leaving the Pac-12 Conference for the Big Ten had to be a shift nearly as seismic in the sports world.…