Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

That was a pretty good season for Purdue. 

Had a saucy defense with 1 player drafted in 2003 and 7 who were productive upperclassmen then drafted in 2004. 

With that defense, despite being a "basketball on grass" spread team, it was a much more balanced attack than other Purdue years. Jerod Void rushed for just under 1,000 with two other RBs getting around 600 combined yards on the ground. John Standeford had more than 1K receiving yards with Taylor Stubblefield not far behind at 835. Kyle Orton wasn't yet the Heisman favorite that he became after week 5 of 2004 (right before his injury and The Fumble against Wisconsin), but played well. 

Team finished 9-4 with a 6-2 conference record. Spent most of the season ranked with wins over #20 Wake Forest, #14 Wisconsin, and #10 Iowa. They opened the season with a better-than-it-appeared-at-the-time loss to a pretty darn good Bowling Green team [who had just promoted their OC after previous HC Urban Meyer left to go sell used cars or something--what happened to him anyway???], had one blowout loss against #10 Michigan, and OT losses to #4 OSU and #11 Georgia in the bowl game.

Probably the best overall team of Joe Tiller's era at Purdue, and yes I'm including the Rose Bowl year in that statement.

Any rememberies from that season?  A customer ordered those teams from Whoa Nellie.  Well, he ordered 10, but I'm tossing in Illinois to complete the conference set.  The Illini were baaaaaaaad.

Indiana's defense allowed 9 yards per pass ATTEMPT.  It's the 2nd-worst of the 2,000 teams I've created, behind 2020 LSU.

That was me, don't worry about tossing in the extra one.  Eventually I'll be requesting some more.

Or if you do, I'll make my next order the ACC, with just 9 teams, so it all evens out

I personally think that was peak college football for me.  So I want to figure out what I want to do with it.  But I think that was peak offensive diversity with the ability to still play stifling defense if you had the personnel.  So I think that's the most fun year to play around with

For some reason I missed that you started the thread, and saw the most recent post, and got excited that someone else wanted to talk 2003 college football.  Otherwise I would have realized what the purpose was.

Speaking of early 2000s Indiana football, BTN playing their 2000 win over Iowa and 2002 upset of Wisconsin today.

I paid a whopping $30 TOTAL for student season tickets in 2002, but missed that upset of Wisconsin, back in Ann Arbor, watching the UM-PSU OT game

What other games did you play?

That was one of the last times that Ohio State and Michigan played for the Rose Bowl. 

Coming into THE GAME, the Buckeyes were 10-1/6-1 and ranked #4 while the Wolverines were 9-2/6-1 and #5.

Ohio State had lost at Wisconsin while Michigan had lost at Oregon OOC and at Iowa. 

The Buckeyes and Wolverines were tied for 1st/2nd heading into THE GAME. Purdue was in third place at 5-2 but had already lost to both and could only tie the loser anyway. 

The BCSCG was completely out of reach for Michigan and realistically out of reach for tOSU* so this was simply an old fashioned tOSU/UM game for the league title and a trip to Pasadena. 

*BCSCG notes:
The Buckeyes were #2 in the BCS standings heading into THE GAME, but LSU also had only one loss and had an extra chance to impress voters and computers (the SECCG). 

Sports strategy?  None really.  I played the hell out of the mobile version of OOTP, but they discontinued it a couple years ago, although they are *supposedly* close to releasing a new one...as they have since 2019.

We played this game quite a bit, but there is no strategy involved.  I don't even think there is a correlation between choosing run/pass (pass being higher risk/higher reward or something).  Plus the nature of VHS is after you played it enough, you always knew which play was coming up next when you got a VCR card.

I remember that game!

I remember one play on the VCR portion with Walter Payton, where he goes for a sweep around one side, gets bottled up, reverses field to go to the other side, gets bottled up there, then reverses field to sweep back to the original side, and was tackled for a 2 yard loss lol... Probably ran 70 yards to lose 2. 

I learned a lot about football rules from that game and from the old Monday Night Football "You make the call!" commercial break teasers...

1. OSU remained in the NC hunt until dropping THE GAME in Tressel's only loss in that series, even though Maurice Clarret was ineligible and Lydell Ross was just awful.

2. Michigan native Craig Krenzel was knocked out of THE GAME after winning it each of the two previous seasons.

3. Bam Childress had one Hell of a Spring Game, making himself a household name in Buckeye lore for generations to come.