Speak With Data

It’s official! Purdue is in a bowl game! On 27 December at 8:30pm EST on Fox the Boilers will take on the Wildcats of Arizona in the Foster Farms Bowl. This preview will include both information about the destination and sponsor in addition to the football preview. If you just want football talk, skip to the heading “Didn’t We Already Beat Arizona This Season?” Where Is This Game? The Foster Farms Bowl is held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, where the San Francisco 49ers “play football”. Santa Clara is just outside San Jose, CA, and is known for being where Levi’s Stadium is and being home to the Santa Clara Vanguard. Look, I’m not from California, so the only things I know about this town are related to football and drum corps. Google is from California, and so provided these lovely maps to help place Santa Clara. Figure 1: Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, and the San Francisco Bay Area [1] For those attending the game, you have the option of three airports:

This is the first time the Bucket has been home since I was a junior at Purdue – the first year of Darrell Hazell’s tenure in West Lafayette. I am not nearly a good enough writer to capture my happiness in this moment. Purdue spent my entire post-college life (and half of college) being a joke nationally with very little to be proud of on Saturday afternoons in the fall. In just one year the narrative has changed. The Boilers won five games against FBS competition (a winning percentage of 11.36%) and three conference games (9.09%) during the 48-game Hazell era; in a single season, Brohm has won six FBS games, including four in conference, for a 50.00% winning percentage overall and 44.44% in conference. And with 6.8 second order wins (wins expected based on per play success rate) per S&P+, one may say that Purdue underachieved in the win column compared to how the Boilers played. Jeff Brohm has done something incredible this year, and capped it off with a win against IU – finally b