Purdue's pathetic game day attendance.

While it doesn't explain all of it (or even most of it), but Purdue students were/are on there Fall Break.

Its purdue

I realize the games later this year are going to be colder, but it was cold in the stadium, and the week before it was forecasted to rain so maybe that was a factor.

This was taken 6 minutes before kickoff.  Regardless of students being gone, that is pretty pathetic.  They even had discounted tickets for the north endzone.

Their fans were cool at least...Since no one goes there, you can leave and re-enter...

As a result, some Purdue fans smuggled a bunch of beers in during the 4th quarter and gave us some... Realized a lot of people were doing the same... At least where we were.

We did at least rouse their curiosity to a certain extent. Granted, a great deal of the stadium appeared to be decked out in mazie and blue actually, but the recorded attendance was 50,501, which is 80.8% of the capacity of Ross Ade. That's the highest attendance all year so far in West Lafayette actually, and only 5,030 more than the official attendance at their shootout with Marshall.

...is only three quarters full throughout the entire game."  I see what you did there.

Purdue hasn't amounted to anything since Drew Brees. They can talk about all of that Cradle of Quarterbacks stuff, but at the end of the day, Purdue is not a football school. The culture just isn't there. I'm sure they're like Indiana in that football is a way to pass the time until basketball season.

To put it in perspective, in the darkest days of 2008 (the Northwestern game comes to mind) when our team was playing terribly, when we were out of the running for a bowl game, playing against a team nobody truly cares about much in God awful weather, we had more of our stadium filled and twice as many people in the stands.

It was nice to leave and re enter, spread my legs out, not have to wait to go to the bathroom, oh yeah and the blowout win

Made my first trip to Purdue this weekend, and I have to say it was one of the most pathetic atmospheres I've ever seen at any football game. Aside from the empty seats (and there were plenty), the cheers were just sad. My personal favorite was when they played the ripped off "Go Purdue" version of "Let's Go Blue" with the band sitting right next to the Michigan section. Michigan fans took it over since it is our song and they never played it again.

The funniest thing of all was at the end of the game, some student was running up and down in front of the student section with a flag that literally said "WAVE" on it. He was trying to get them to do the wave. It failed.

Seemed more like a MAC program than Big Ten.

Why are you addressing Purdue fans on something all Michigan fans already know?

"Do you even want to be in the Big Ten?"

Uhhh... yes?

/TheB1GIsHorribleRightNow

I think they have the same problem Sparty does.  Nobody who didn't actually go there wants to go to the games.  Sadly for Purdue, it appears that their alums don't care, either, which makes it even worse.  

Purdue was considered Big Ten title contenders for one week.  And I doubt even their own fans were convinced of that coming off a shootout with Marshall.  (Why that never figured into Herbstreit's thinking, I'll never know.) 

What it really boils down to is that in the last 8 years, Purdue has put up the following season records: 7-6, 4-8, 5-7, 4-8, 8-5, 8-6, 5-6 and 7-5.  That's 53 losses since 2004.  Purdue is back to looking like the Purdue I saw growing up.  Look no further than that as to why the attendance wasn't sold out.  Even when we were sending top 5 and top 10 teams into that stadium under Bo, Moeller and Lloyd, rarely was it sold out. 

Purdue... I mean Purdue.

Its Purdue.

Michigan fans hardly know what it means to have a losing season. Purdue has had three in the last four years, and their "best season ever" in 2000 saw them end ranked lower than Michigan in a down year. You gotta respect fans that still show up after all of that.

From the TV angles, it seemed like a lot of the crowd left at half-time and never came back.

a few years ago, it still looks like the embarassing crap-hole that I visited in the mid-80's to watch Michigan give Purdue their annual spanking.  The end zone seats still look like the rickety high school bleachers back then.  And fall break or no fall break, there's no excuse for students not showing up for this game.  They wouldn't do that for a home basketball game.  

There is another program that went 58-7-1 over the course of six seasons from 1969 through 1974, one of the best records in the entire country.

The season records were 8-3, 9-1, 11-1, 10-1, 10-0-1, and 10-1.

At the start of the season from '70 through '74, they were ranked #8, #4, #11, #5, and #6.

This team had 38 home games during this span of national excellence. How did the fan base respond? There were exactly 7 capacity crowds. As late as November 1974, with the team 9-0 and ranked #3 in the nation, a crowd of 88K—12,000 under capacity—watched the home team dismantle Purdue (ironically enough) 51-0.

Attendance was starting to really get ramped up in the 1975 season when the team started out #3, but even so there were still three home games with less than capacity crowds.

This attendance record is especially interesting given the fact that comparatively few of the games were televised back then, meaning you either were at the game or had to be content with grainy photos in the local paper, or maybe an article in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

I think this means that it will probably take 5 years or so of sustained excellence for most fan bases to fill a stadium on an every-game basis, and even then the excellence has to be continuous. It's a remarkable testament to this fan base that during three miserable seasons recently there were still (nominally) capacity crowds.

While we are calling out Purdue, we have to give credit where it is due in the other direction . . . to Wisconsin.  

For years, Wisconsin was terrible.  Yet even so, they had passionate capacity crowds.  They earned their eventual success.  They are the anti-Purdue.