Boilermakers

Jack Mollenkopf took Purdue to its first Rose Bowl in 1967. The Boilermakers had been playing football since 1887, when they lost their opening game 48–6 to Butler College, and it took another four years before a newspaper reporter, describing a 44–0 win over Wabash College, called the side "the Burly Boiler Makers from Purdue" — a nod to the university's engineering roots that stuck as the nickname.

Parke H. Davis named Purdue national champion for 1931, a claim the university itself has never pressed.

Joe Tiller coached more games and won more of them than anyone else in the program's history, and his years produced a run of bowl appearances — Alamo Bowl wins in 1997 and 1998, a Sun Bowl in 2002 — that kept Purdue in the mix through the turn of the century. Earlier trips to the Peach, Bluebonnet and Liberty Bowls in the late 1970s and 1980, and a Music City Bowl win in 2021, fill out a record heavier on bowl trips than conference crowns.

The program has sent a striking number of players to the Pro Football Hall of Fame — Bob Griese, Len Dawson, Drew Brees and Cris Carter among them. Games against Indiana still close the season, with the Old Oaken Bucket, contested since 1925, going to whoever wins it.