@HopefulDanny Revealed

Many have discovered @HopefulDanny over the past couple of seasons, including media members, players, recruits and, of course, students. Former BS'er Teddy Huff even asked who was the mastermind (not his words) behind the brilliance that is Hopeful Danny.

Well....it was us.

If you didn't figure that out, though, I question your detective skills a bit. Who else in the Purdue writing community is that bitingly hilarious? Who else can create such comedy?

Well, when Danny Hope is the guy you're lampooning, it's actually pretty easy. In fact, the challenge often came in figuring out how to sound more goofy than the actual man himself. We suspect that's what so many people liked about the twitter feed, though -- that almost everything we wrote was something you could very easily hear Danny saying during a press conference.

Two years ago, prior to the 2011 season, we had kicked the idea around and then one day, I got a note from B-dowd that simply said "The die is cast," with a link to Hopeful Danny's feed. And so the fun began.

We both found it to be an incredible outlet -- a release valve where we could make fun of the situation in front of us in a way that wasn't really mean-spirited, but was more in a way we could all laugh about and sort of just shake our heads... ah, life as a Purdue football fan.

The content pretty much wrote itself. We began listening to midweek pressers just for the nuggets of nonsense Danny would spout out. If he got on a particular theme, which happened often, we would begin caricaturing that theme for a few days and we'd add it to the files to be brought back at key times. As with the origins of this site, we mainly did it to entertain each other and perhaps a few friends, but then it quickly began growing into something that those with (we like to think) smart senses of humor really began to enjoy. I often thank you readers for the compliments we get and the HopefulDanny feed was no different -- in fact, we were referred to as "genius" far more often for a phony twitter feed than we ever have been for our work here.

A quick note about fake twitter accounts: they don't really work if you pick something or someone that isn't naturally funny or so completely serious that doing an alter-ego is funny. If you take someone like Matt Painter and just add a bunch of cursing and strange remarks... it's kind of boring. Lampooning guys like Danny Hope is so easy because he's already kind of oddly likable even as you're laughing at him. Even those who wanted him fired never truly hated the man

With Danny's tenure at Purdue ending, the value of the feed goes away now, but if he does catch on at someplace like Florida International, the material may be just too good to pass up. So keep him on your list of follows. You never know when he may resurface.

He is a #champion, after all.