Gameday Getup

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 that left you going ‘meh’. 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. Purdue has one of the best in the business in Ted Huff who maintains the @BoilerUniforms twitter account (seriously, the guy is awesome and shares a ton of really unique bits of history about Purdue’s uniforms).

Partnering with @BoilerUniforms so he can share some information on the uniforms Purdue will wear on gameday, here is what he has to say about Purdue’s uniform choice against the Iowa Hawkeyes:

“Purdue uses the grey jerseys for the first time since Military Appreciation Day 2019 against Minnesota. This is the fourth time they are used for military recognition , fifth if including the 2015 anthracite jersey. Iowa faces grey for a second time, only opponent to repeat.”

“While the video was under lit, it appears they are wearing black pants as opposed to the dark grey anthracite pants only worn once during this uniform’s history.”

“Controversially they are wearing the traditional gold helmet, which has never been worn with the greys and fails the traditional ‘helmet matches pants’ approach that Purdue has used a great deal in recent years. It also appears there is a subtle camo pattern on the helmet decals - it seems more muted in color than the 2021 MSU woodland camo decals, but we expected this due to being the game before Veteran’s day.”

“This first time combo should have never left the drawing board, a commenter described this as ‘designed by committee’ and I can’t disagree. There is no chemistry in the set and it screams “let’s try something, we’re throwing them away next year anyway”.”

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

@BoilerUniforms