Wildcats

Northwestern has played there since long before that renovation was ever discussed, in a stadium that has carried the Wildcats name for generations without needing to move.

The program traces itself back to a game on 22 February 1876 against the Chicago Football Club, making it one of the older football sides in the country. Purple became the official colour in 1892, paired since with white, and both still mark out the team on the field at Ryan Field each autumn.

Conference titles have come in clusters rather than a steady run: shares of the Big Ten crown in 1903, 1926, 1930, 1931 and 1936, then a gap of nearly sixty years before the side won it again in 1995 and 1996, followed by 2000. That stretch through the 1990s marked a side that had spent decades being pinned back in the conference suddenly holding its own. More recently, the Big Ten West division title came twice, in 2018 and 2020.

In bowl games the defining result remains the 1948 Rose Bowl, the team's first such win and still the one associated with Northwestern's name outside Big Ten circles; wins followed later at the Gator Bowl in 2013 and the Citrus Bowl in 2021. Against Indiana, a rivalry renewed most recently in 2024 with a 41-24 Hoosiers win, the fixture has rarely settled into one side's favour for long.