Commitment to Athletic Excellence

History of Purdue Athletics

Intercollegiate athletic competition involving Purdue dates to the 1880s, when the first Purdue baseball teams took on Lafayette-area clubs as well as regional foes, including Wabash College.

Football debuted in 1887. In those early days, the names hurled at opponents were nearly as fierce as the competition. Newspaper reporters who covered sports often took jabs at opposing teams.

By the early 1890s, Purdue not only was enjoying great success in football but also was becoming known as a “railroad school,” where research on the first in a succession of locomotives was beginning to establish the University as a leader in engineering teaching and research.

In 1891, sports writers picked up on the railroad theme as they chronicled the exploits of the Purdue team. Although Purdue football teams had been called by such unsavory epithets as rolling mill hands, blacksmiths, and grangers, one insult stuck. It came after Purdue defeated Wabash College 44-0 in October 1891. A headline in a newspaper in Crawfordsville, Indiana – home of Wabash – read “Wabash Snowed Completely Under by the Burly Boilermakers From Purdue.” By the next week, Lafayette papers were gleefully reporting that the Purdue team was being called boilermakers. By the next fall, the name had entered the popular lexicon.

Purdue offers 18 varsity sports with teams and individuals competing in the Big Ten Conference and at the Division I level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The aim of this program is to enable qualified undergraduates to engage in competition at the highest level. The responsibility for enforcing the association’s rules as well as those defined by Purdue is placed by the University jointly upon the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics and the Faculty Athletic Affairs Committee.