NCAA Football tickets / Stanford tickets
Welcome Purdue Football fans! Now, you can effortlessly buy tickets to your favorite Purdue games with Golden Tickets. Purdue football ticket inventory for the can be viewed by clicking on the link below.
Welcome to Golden Tickets
Golden Tickets is your one-stop source for Purdue football tickets. Think of us as your passport to the best Purdue tickets with over 16 years of experience in the business of obtaining first-class NCAA Football seats in a secure and flexible online environment. We are founding members of the National Association of Ticket Brokers (NATB) and have been in excellent standing with the Better Business Bureau for 16 years.
As an industry leader, you can count on Golden Tickets for:
- On-time delivery of your Purdue tickets;
- Encrypted ticket orders processed through a secure server;
- and Convenient payment and delivery options.
Purdue tickets are available for sale online 24 hours a day. Clicking on any link on our Purdue tickets page will take you to our secure server to complete your purchase. For your own protection, a Golden Tickets representative may contact you to verify your billing information. If you cannot find the Purdue tickets you're looking for, please call us at (800) 288-2461 for assistance.
Search for additional NCAA tickets by clicking here. If your interests extend beyond Purdue, visit our Quick Ticket Finder.
About Purdue Football
The year was 1891, and a little-known school that prided itself on educating men and women for productive, utilitarian careers was just beginning to experience success in football. DePauw, Wabash and Butler were the football powers of Indiana in those days. Purdue was late to the game, fielding its first team in 1887 and losing its only game to Butler 48 to 6.
By 1891, Purdue had hired two coaches from eastern power Princeton and was on the verge of an era of total domination of opponents. In the 1891 season opener, Purdue traveled to Wabash College in nearby Crawfordsville. Besides coming away with a 44-0 victory, the Purdue "eleven," as football teams were known back then, headed back to West Lafayette with a new nickname.
In the 1890s, hometown newspapers were considerably more protective of college teams than they are today. After the 44-0 drubbing, one Crawfordsville newspaper lashed out at the "Herculean wearers of the black and old gold." Beneath the headline "Slaughter of Innocents," the paper told of the injustice visited upon the "light though plucky" Wabash squad.
"Wabash Snowed Completely Under by the Burly Boiler Makers From Purdue" proclaimed another headline on the same story in the Daily Argus-News.
By the next week, the Lafayette papers were returning the taunts: "As everyone knows, Purdue went down to Wabash last Saturday and defeated their eleven. The Crawfordsville papers have not yet gotten over it. The only recourse they have is to claim that we beat their 'scientific' men by brute force. Our players are characterized as 'coal heavers,' 'boiler makers' and 'stevedores,'" wrote a reporter for the Lafayette Sunday Times of Nov. 1, 1891.
The nickname stemmed from the nature of a Purdue education. As a land-grant institution, the college since its founding in 1869 had schooled the sons and daughters of the working class for work that was considered beneath the high-born who attended liberal arts colleges such as Wabash.
That same fall of 1891, Purdue had acquired a working railroad engine to mount in a newly established locomotive laboratory. It was one more step in the development of Purdue as one of the world's leaders in engineering teaching and research. For athletic adversaries and their boosters, this specialty in engineering education - and the other concentration at the founding of the institution, agriculture - served as fodder for name-calling.
Over the years, Purdue teams had been called grangers, pumpkin-shuckers, railsplitters, cornfield sailors, blacksmiths, foundry hands and, finally, boilermakers. That last one stuck.
About the Stadium
Ross-Ade Stadium has been the venerable home to Purdue football since 1924.
From 2001 to 2003, Ross-Ade underwent a $70 million renovation that has made it one of the most attractive and fan-friendly facilities in all of college football.
Ross-Ade was dedicated Nov. 22, 1924, in a game against intrastate rival Indiana (the Boilermakers won 26-7). The stadium is named for its two principal benefactors, David E. Ross, late president of the Board of Trustees, and the late George Ade, writer, humorist and Purdue alumnus. It was Ross who conceived the idea for the stadium and selected the site. He and Ade purchased and presented to the university the 65-acre tract on which the stadium is located.
The stadium's original seating capacity was 13,500 (with standing room for an additional 5,000). Six expansions, plus end zone bleacher seating, eventually raised it to 69,200 in 1970. Current capacity is 62,500.
Ross-Ade features a Prescription Athletic Turf (PAT) playing surface. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when most collegiate stadiums were being converted to artificial turf, two Purdue staffers, W.H. Daniel and Melvin Robey, developed PAT, installing it in the stadium in the spring of 1975 at a cost of approximately $125,000. The playing surface since has been resodded five times, most recently in November of 2003.
Known as the perfect compromise between natural grass and artificial turf, PAT can keep the field playable and virtually divot-proof, even during a storm dumping one inch of rain per hour. A network of pipes connected to pumps capable of extracting water from the turf or watering it makes the system work. The pipes are located 16 inches below the surface and covered with a mixture of sand and filler. Purdue's PAT field has been the model for more than 30 institutions around the country.
World War I had just ended. An energetic alumnus and accomplished inventor named David Ross was out raising money to help build the Purdue Memorial Union. Although most alumni he contacted would see him, most declined to support the project, even though they knew from their college days that the university lacked a place to hold dances and for students to gather informally.
Why the disdain for helping alma mater? According to the book David Ross: Modern Pioneer, Ross was told repeatedly by successful alumni: "Give us a winning football team, for a change, and then we'll think about contributing money to Purdue. We're tired of being made fun of by alumni of other big colleges during the football season."
Since 1892, the Purdue eleven had played on Stuart Field, a modest athletics complex located just east of the current Armory on campus. Purdue had reached the pinnacle of football glory in the mid-1890s by capturing four consecutive Indiana Intercollegiate Athletic Association crowns. Since the advent of the Western Conference - later the Big Nine and Big Ten - Boilermaker football fortunes had leveled off and were in a state of decline.
Ross, a member of the Class of 1893, came away from his fund-raising forays convinced that a new stadium would attract better talent, both in terms of coaches and players. Success on the field would follow. So he turned his attention to the state of Purdue athletics facilities. He teamed with George Ade of the Class of 1887, and the pair bought a 65-acre farm north of campus. With the help of dozens of alumni and others, Ross-Ade Stadium was completed in time for Homecoming 1924. In the dedication game, Purdue prevailed 26-7 over Indiana.
On the matter of whether superior facilities would fuel success on the field, Ross was right. Five years after the stadium that bears his name was dedicated, the Boilermakers were celebrating their first outright Big Ten championship.
Although a football renaissance has been under way since Joe Tiller's first season as head coach in 1997, that rebirth is getting a $70 million boost in the form of a renovation of the stadium inside and out. It is the first comprehensive upgrade since ground was broken nearly 80 years ago.
The stadium started out with a capacity of 13,500 on the east and west sides and space for another 5,000 to stand in the north bend.
For six decades, Ross-Ade gradually grew in capacity to 69,000. The first addition was the completion of standing-room space in the north bend of the stadium in 1930. Originally a tiered hillside, the closed end of the stadium was finished with concrete to add 5,000 seats.
In the 1940s and 1950s, permanent grandstands went in on the east and west sides. Among the last expansions was in 1963, when the field was excavated to make room for 13 more rows below the original seats.
Although the capacity of the stadium increased over the decades, the footprint remained the same. Fans became accustomed to a cramped concourse, to getting to the stadium early to avoid the crowds and inevitable bottlenecks. Those who waited until close to kickoff would be fortunate to see a few minutes of the first quarter.
All of that has changed with the remade Ross-Ade. Work on the three-year project began in 2001 with the relocation of Beering Drive, the road that flanked the stadium to the west. After the conclusion of the 2001 home season, delayed two weeks by the postponement of the Sept. 15 Notre Dame game to Dec. 1 as a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, work began in earnest. The 1950s-era press box was demolished, and by early 2002, steel framework was being erected for the Pavilion on the west side of the stadium, an enduring architectural exclamation point.
In the old Woodworth Memorial Press Box, reporters and announcers who covered the Boilermakers were spread over three of the four levels of the structure. Network announcers occupied the second level, and print reporters watched the game from the third floor. Atop the press box, in structures that served their purpose but resembled ice-fishing shanties, radio play-by-play announcers and color commentators chronicled the exploits of the Boilermakers.
In the new four-story Pavilion, all media occupy the Shively Media Center on the fourth level. A photo deck above the fourth level affords a sweeping view of campus and a bird's-eye view of the action on the field.
On the lower levels of the Pavilion, fans who purchase seat licenses and suite licenses enjoy a unique experience unimagined by Ross. In 2002, 34 suites and a 200-seat indoor club were unveiled. One year later, outdoor club seating was completed. Fans in those seats enjoy an elevated view of the field, as well as access to the Shively Stadium Club.
A grand staircase at the southeast corner of Ross-Ade is sure to become an architectural signature for the venerable home of the Boilermakers. Beneath the stairs, a tunnel dedicated to the victims of the 1903 "football special" train wreck welcomes the football team into the stadium.
Less striking but every bit as integral to the renovation was the replacement of concrete throughout the stadium, as well as all new bench seating throughout. A new sound system was added in 2002. The crowning touch is the red-brick exterior on the new concourse buildings, a unifying element with Cary Quadrangle to the south and the rest of the red-brick West Lafayette campus.
Expanded seat widths and other changes in the stadium reduced seating capacity to 62,500 beginning with the 2003 season. It was 67,332 prior to the renovation and was 66,295 for 2002.
|
|
