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1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team

football team of Purdue University during the 1980 season

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 25, 2026
Entity authorityQ4579376 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team was an American football team that represented Purdue University during the 1980 Big Ten Conference football season. In their fourth season under head coach Jim Young, the Boilermakers finished in a tie for second place in the Big Ten Conference, compiled a 9–3 record (7–1 against Big Ten opponents), defeated Missouri in the Liberty Bowl, were ranked No. 16 in the final AP Poll, and outscored all opponents by a combined total of 328 to 233. The team played its home games at Ross–Ade Stadium in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Quarterback Mark Herrmann gained national attention for breaking the NCAA's career record for passing yardage. He finished his collegiate career having completed 772 of 1,309 passes for 9,946 yards, 71 touchdowns, and 75 interceptions. Herrmann and teammate Dave Young, a tight end, were the only two Big Ten players to be recognized as consensus first-team players on the 1980 College Football All-America Team. Herrmann also won the Chicago Tribune Silver Football as the most valuable player in the Big Ten Conference.

Several Purdue players ranked among the Big Ten leaders in various statistical categories, including the following:

Mark Herrmann led the Big Ten Conference with 3,212 passing yards, a 65.8 pass completion percentage, 23 passing touchdowns, 8.7 yards per passing attempt, a 150.5 pass efficiency rating, and 3,026 passing yards.

Dave Young led the Big Ten with 70 receptions and ranked second in the Big Ten with nine receiving touchdowns and third with 959 receiving yards.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team” as football team of Purdue University during the 1980 season. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1980—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Purdue, Boilermakers and football can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as football team of Purdue University during the 1980 season. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4579376. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

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  • Institutional context
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team primary sources, 1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team archive and Purdue research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1980 Purdue Boilermakers football team” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.