As a Purdue alumnus and season ticket holder, it's hard not to cringe at what's been happening to the Boilermakers this season. A 1-5 start to the season against a tough schedule was bad, but three home losses since to the likes of Illinois last Saturday (not bad), Wisconsin last Wednesday (tough, but you've gotta win those), and Baylor before that (yikes!) have taken the life out of the Purdue fan base with the team's record at 4-8.
Against Illinois, the game was sold out. The student section was nearly half-empty, since the game was the weekend before school started up again, and the tickets were part of their package. So, that's sort of understandable -- although, being a former student season ticket holder before who'd been denied tickets to a pre-spring semester weekend game, I feel a little shafted. Anyway, I can't complain because those 1,000 or so tickets didn't fall into the hands of even more orange-clad Illinois fans (since, of course, there's no way that that many Purdue students would've shown up to a game that they didn't already have on their package -- even if it was the #1 team in the country). Still, there were several thousand of those Illinois fans, and seeing them made me see red (well, orange).
Here's a couple pictures, courtesy of purduesports.com, that I edited to show the amount of orange in the crowd:
The left is Matt Kiefer, the right is Charles Davis. Those pictures don't quite show the magnitude of the infestation, but they do give the basic idea. Either way, it's sad to see the fans give up on a team like the Purdue fans have this year; while Gene Keady has struggled in past years, it'd be nice to send him out with a proper farewell.
For better or for worse, the season continues Wednesday night in Minneapolis. As that article says, the last time the Boilers were 0-3 in the Big Ten was 1963. Let's hope it stays that way.
