Today’s Argument: Arni’s Should Be The “Official Pizza” Of Purdue Football

I have a modest proposal for boosting Purdue’s football coffers. Fret not, you English Lit majors. This isn’t like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal; I’m not about to suggest eating Irish children.

This is far more disgusting.

It’s no secret that Purdue gets mentions on this blog not because of my fandom; rather because I live in the heart of Boiler Nation.  That fact dooms me to a daily existence listening to Purdue football fans expressing opinions begging to be broken down. 

Naturally, this can put me at odds with a vast swath of my greater Lafayette neighbors. The freshest example was my case why Purdue would be making a mistake firing head coach Ryan Walters. Given when it was written, even I knew Walters wasn’t going to survive giving up 60+ to hated rival Indiana.

Despite that, one problem remains in the wake of Walters’ departure. Other than some recent infrastructure improvements,  Purdue has a reticence to spend money on football. After all, Ryan Walters was the “on the cheap” hire even though the athletic department had a fat buy-out check in hand for the services of Jeff Brohm.

Despite the current quality of the on-field product, Purdue football is a big-boy program in a mega-conference. It has the facilities and the resources to be at a much higher level of performance, but in this all-too-lengthy post-Joe Tiller era, Boiler football always finds a way to implode. Usually, the catalyst for Boiler failure falls into one of two categories: the aforementioned “on the cheap” syndrome or good ol’ fashioned bad decision making.

The “on the cheap” problem went away with the hiring of Barry Odom. To lure him away from UNLV, Purdue offered Odom a 6-year, $39 million deal not including various incentives and bonuses. That’s a significant step up from the 5-year, $21 million deal Ryan Walters got. Granted, the success of the Odom hiring will only be known over time.

That’s why it’s also time for Purdue to buck the other trend; it has the chance to make a tremendous decision when it comes to money.

Face it, the pointless quibbles over resource allocation ring a bit more hollow in the Transfer Portal/Name-Image-Likeness era because the pretense that college football isn’t a multi-billion dollar professional sports enterprise has been stripped barer than Purdue’s cupboard of football talent. Face it again…the biggest factor which will determine Barry Odom and Purdue’s success in the immediate future will come with the players he and the program can get to come to West Lafayette. Together, those can only mean one thing…means money.

That’s why I’m pointing out a vast untapped revenue source for Purdue football. The next time you watch a football game at any level, count how many commercials for pizza you see. Be it delivery or frozen,  football fans can’t get enough. In fact, there’s a local pizza chain that’s so popular, it just announced shipping is now available to anywhere in the United States.

Not many will disagree about the universal appeal of pizza, but there are regional quirks to be found. Across America, the lingua franca of pizza definitely has dialects, which explains why pizza is another area where my fellow residents of greater Lafayette and I part ways. That regional quirk which has a following sizable enough to warrant involving the Fed-UPS guy inherently means it can generate a river of cash.

As I don’t speak the regional pizza dialect, I’m am seen as a heretic amongst the locals who take communion on the altar of Arni’s Pizza. Yes, I know there are few things more personal than religion and hometown pizza places. But there’s a simple fact native Lafayetters don’t understand about their favorite…

…Arni’s Pizza is vile.

I know I’m not alone; I have yet to find a fellow transplant who can stomach it. But that opinion is exactly I owe the Arni’s-o-philes an explanation as to why I’m arguing for Arni’s to be the official pizza of Purdue football. But before I do, allow me to walk you through simulating the Arni’s Pizza experience for those who have yet to suffer it,

Start with a supermarket-brand frozen pizza. Throw it away, but keep the cardboard disc it comes on. Use it as your crust. Cover it with an allegedly tomato-based sauce. Even though the sauce is deliberately bland as not to offend the overly-sensitive Hoosier palate, don’t use enough to make the cardboard crust edible.

After the lack of sauce has been added, add a few handfuls of a cheese mixture so flavorless distinguishing it from packing foam may require laboratory testing. To make it a genuinely Arni’s experience, ensure that even at room temperature the cheese sweats enough grease to float a river barge.

No matter how you complete your topping experience, the true pièce de résistance is the 10-pound salt lick contained in every Arni’s menu item. Even their tap water is so salty it will make your butthole pucker from dehydration.

That brings us back to my seeming disparity…why would I advocate for a pizza place I can’t stand? It’s all about the money.

I know I’m the out-of-towner; I’m fully aware of how much in the minority I am. That’s how I know they’re sitting on a massive money stream. What I think of this gastric abomination is irrelevant; there’s massive chunk of Boiler Nation that not only love this shit, they’re lining up to ship it. Nobody will notice the absence of my drops of money in the river of cash which could be had by a strategic partnership between Purdue and Arni’s.

It’s such a natural fit it would be borderline criminal not to make it profitable. After all, Arni’s proves Purdue fans have more lowered expectations than second marriages and high-school dropouts combined. Since Joe Tiller took Purdue to it’s last Rose Bowl, Boiler fans really no longer care why they can’t have nice things as they’ve become so accustomed to not having them. That’s why they were ecstatic in the Jeff Brohm years to get an 8 or 9-win season and a trip to a middlin’-to-shitty “between the holidays” bowl game.

But Boiler football isn’t going to get anywhere near Brohm’s high water mark unless Purdue figures out how the new Transfer Portal/Name-Image-Likeness era really works. To that end, making a few bucks off bad pizza can’t be a bad idea.

Change my mind.

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