Gameday Getup

Purdue Boilermakers vs. Illinois Fighting Illini

@BoilerUniforms

The interest in college uniforms started almost two decades ago with the EA Sports College Football franchise allowing you some freedom in what uniforms you would wear and the colors as well. Fast forward a few years and suddenly Oregon was all the rage with their multitude of combinations they can wear (currently they state they can wear 327 different combinations) that sometimes doesn’t even feature a recognized color of the school.

Since then we have seen some absolutely iconic Purdue football looks (like the Drew Brees throwback or the all white Spacesuit alternate) and some, like the combination against Iowa, left us wanting to make sure they didn’t pick out the combination with their eyes closed. With this interest there have been a number of uniform tracking accounts pop up on places like Twitter who look at the history of an athletic department’s uniform usage.

Partnering again with Boiler Uniforms (seriously, go add him on Twitter!), he has this to say about the uniform combination the Boilers will be wearing on gameday against the Fighting Illini for the battle for the Purdue Cannon:
“Purdue heads to Champaign with the Black/White/White combo for the first time on this uniform template. Debuted in 2014 against Notre Dame at Lucas Oil, they would wear it at home against Michigan State (with volt decals for the first Hammer Down Cancer game) and at Indiana that same year, but 0 uses since the end of the 2014 season. This will be the second time in 4 games this combination will have nontraditional decals.”

“Going 0-3, including 0-2 in trophy games, make this statistically an interesting choice for a do or die game. General feedback so far is fans would have liked to see the Oreo Combo - Black/White/Black. While that combination had double digit losses in a row, it currently sits on a 2 game win streak after two nice wins last season (UConn and Nebraska).”

“This is the first time since 2019 where the team uses the white pants more than once and only the 7th time in the modern era.”

“The key feature this week are the white decals that were introduced for this combo. The standard Motion P decal is done in white and the Gold helmet’s single black stripe is flipped here in white. It is the inversion of the 2019 white helmet at Northwestern where they used the black decal set on the white helmet.”

“Overall, I’m glad they brought it back for the first time in 8 seasons, even if it’s not the combination I would have selected for this game. Especially with the decals being white, the black pants would have really done a lot to tie things together.”

Go check out @BoilerUniforms on twitter or his link tree for even more information and check out his recent article in the Purdue Exponent:

1 man, 1,100 uniforms: @BoilerUniforms tracks Purdue’s uniform combinations