Super Fan Spotlight

Paul Branham - West Lafayette, Indiana

Paul and his family are Purdue die-hards through and through. When your dad is the men’s basketball team manager as a student, it’s pretty clear you are destined to be a Boilermaker. We sat down with Paul to learn all about his fandom in this exclusive Super Fan Spotlight.


What classifies you as a Purdue Superfan?

I’ve been a Purdue fan my entire life. My dad went to Purdue and was a manager on the men’s basketball team when he was a student. I earned two diplomas from Purdue in engineering and had the privilege of driving the school mascot, the Boilermaker Special, as a student. I also now work at Purdue as the Industry Business Development Director in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. I have been to every Big Ten football stadium and basketball arena—a list I’ve had to finish multiple times thanks to conference expansion and will soon have to finish again. We have season tickets for Purdue football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. This year has been a very special one for us as men’s basketball fans. In addition to the home games we’ve been at, we’ve been at every neutral-site game and most of the away games. We have followed Purdue to Arkansas (exhibition game), Hawaii, Indianapolis, and Toronto for all of Purdue’s non-conference games away from Mackey Arena. We drove out to games at Maryland, Rutgers, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Michigan, and Illinois. We will be in Minneapolis for the Big Ten Tournament, and plan to go anywhere and everywhere the postseason takes Purdue this year. I’d love nothing more than to burn up some of my vacation days on drive time to/from Arizona in April.

What's your favorite moment as a fan?

Oh wow, that’s really tough to choose… there are so many. I guess one memory that stands out was when Purdue clinched the Big Ten championship in 2017 on senior day against Indiana, 86-75. I remember Purdue Pete doing snow angels in the confetti on the floor and it was just a really surreal moment. That was the first conference title they won after I had graduated and moved on from the student section to where my season tickets are now, and the first since 2010. We’ve been fortunate to see Purdue win 3 more regular season titles since then, but that was one that sticks with me because it was only a few years before that when Purdue was 5-13 in conference, so the 2017 championship was sort of the beginning of the era of Purdue basketball that we are living through right now.

What's the best game (in any sport) you've ever attended for your team?

I am tempted to say the 2021 Music City Bowl (Purdue 48 Tennessee 45) because of recency bias, but the 1999 women’s National Championship game (Purdue 62 Duke 45) probably has to hold that crown until Purdue wins another national title. Even though I was only 11 years old at that game, I still remember it.

What's the craziest thing you've ever done as a fan?

Some might contend that faithfully renewing my season tickets during the Danny Hope and Darrell Hazell years of Purdue football might qualify. Oddly enough, I think some of my craziest sports fan moments have come on things unrelated to Purdue, but maybe that’s just because everything I do when Purdue is involved is just par for the course and to be expected at this point. “Grab your passport, we’re going to Canada to watch Zach Edey play.” “Would you rather have a normal Christmas, or go to the Maui Invitational?”— totally normal conversations in my house.

I’m not sure how crazy anyone will think these things are, but here are some stories that come to mind as unusual, even for me: I’ve been to the Final Four 11 times so far - 9 men’s and 2 women’s. We’ve already established that one was the 1999 WBB one when Purdue won it. In 2011, after watching UConn (MBB) beat Butler in Houston, I went to a local Academy to buy some Texas A&M gear because I realized that my flight home to Indianapolis would get there just in time to make it downtown to catch the WBB title game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame.

Before people criticize me for being a bandwagon fan, I just have two things to say: 1, I grew up in Texas and have lots of friends and family who went to A&M. 2, as a Purdue fan, I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to root against Notre Dame. So I got scalped tickets on the street for like $40 at the top of the lower level a few minutes after the game started, and got to watch my second national championship game in two days. A&M won.

My first men’s final four was in 2005 in St Louis. I was a junior in high school and had gotten out of school halfway through the day to fly to STL and meet my dad for the national championship game, since he was already there on what was probably “a conveniently timed business trip”. The only problem: Illinois was in the final four, had won their semifinal, and their fans were everywhere. Tickets were impossible to find. Some Louisville fans took pity on me and GAVE me a ticket, for free, in row R of the lower level. My dad sent me on in, expecting to catch the game in a sports bar if push came to shove. Miraculously, he wound up with a free ticket of his own, although it was in the mezzanine. 10 minutes into the game, it became evident that the Louisville fan who was supposed to occupy the seat next to mine had opted to watch the game from a bar or something instead, so I got ahold of my dad and we were able to sit together in the lower level of a national championship game, despite having not paid a dime for our seats, and not even having seats that were supposed to be together.

That’s less a crazy thing I did and more a crazy thing that just happened to me, but never again has anything that wild happened to us. I was also back in school halfway through the next day.

What's the most memorable fan item you've ever spent money on?

I’ve got a newspaper from a Purdue football victory in the Alamo Bowl with Joe Tiller’s autograph on it, which I think I won in a raffle many years back. With Cowboy Joe being gone now, that holds a little extra sentimental value these days.