Fame Ijeboi Drops 195 Yards and 3 TDs on His Old Team as Purdue Hammers Minnesota 41-13

The revenge game of the year in the Big Ten

Fame Ijeboi spent 2024 and 2025 as a Minnesota Golden Gopher. On Saturday night, he spent four quarters making the Gophers regret letting him leave. The Purdue sophomore punished his old program with 195 rushing yards and three touchdowns on 31 carries — a 6.3-yard average that reads like a typo against a Minnesota defense that came into the night ranked fourth in the Big Ten against the run.

The big plays kept coming in waves: rips of 30, 26, 22, 15, 14, 13 and 11 yards, six carries of 10-plus on the night. Ijeboi was the focal point from the opening drive, and Purdue's counters kept opening holes so wide that Minnesota's defense started to look, frankly, lost — no adjustments, no answers, just more Ijeboi. He capped the drive that gave Purdue its 17-point halftime cushion and never slowed down after the break.

Put the night in the record books: 195 yards is the 15th-best single-game rushing total in Purdue history, and the most since Markell Jones ran for 217 at Indiana in 2017. Ijeboi's three touchdowns pushed his season total to nine, tying Kory Sheets' 2006 mark for the most by a Boilermaker through the first six games of a season since 1995. That's a Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week case you can write with a Sharpie.

Browne ran it too — and the defense owned the line of scrimmage

This wasn't a one-man show, even if it felt like it. Ryan Browne started 5-for-7 for 85 yards and a score on Purdue's first two drives and finished 14-of-24 for 159 yards and a touchdown — a first-quarter strike to tight end George Burhenn, his second score of the season and third of his career. Browne also scrambled for a season-high 81 rushing yards on seven carries, including a 12-yard touchdown run that pushed the lead to 34-13 in the fourth quarter and turned the rest of the night into a party.

The part that should scare the rest of the Big Ten: Purdue came into Saturday with the conference's worst rushing offense. It finished with over 300 yards on the ground — a season best — at 6.5 yards a carry. Head coach Barry Odom credited the whole operation after the game, said the run game is "not just the offensive line, that's tight ends, receivers blocking, running backs running the way they are," and that the offense embraced the week's mantra — "stay on schedule" — and executed it.

The defense was just as mean. Minnesota managed 2.1 yards per carry and went 4-for-15 on third and fourth downs. Purdue outgained the Gophers 310-131 in the first half, allowed only four first downs over the first 30 minutes, and got a half-ending interception from linebacker Jojo Hayden — who also led the team with six tackles. True freshman kicker Jacobo Echeverria Lozano, who came in ranked third nationally, stayed automatic with field goals from 28 and 45 yards and five extra points.

What this does to Purdue's season — and Minnesota's

Zoom out for a second. Purdue won three games combined the previous two seasons. At midseason, the Boilermakers are 3-3 — and they've won back-to-back Big Ten games for the first time since the end of the 2022 season, when they finished 8-4 and played for a conference title. One week after posting a Big Ten win, Odom's team followed it with the most dominant conference performance of his tenure. The rebuild in West Lafayette just stopped being a theory.

For Minnesota, this one stings in a specific way. The Gophers came in 4-1 with the Big Ten's fourth-best rushing defense and a quarterback room that was supposed to keep things steady. Instead, Drake Lindsey never found a rhythm, the run game produced 25 yards all night, and the defense got gashed by the exact player they used to have on their own roster. It's the Gophers' first conference loss, and the film session on Monday is going to be rough — a defense that entered the night with 14 sacks and 40 tackles for loss managed three tackles for loss for five yards.

The Boilermakers' path is suddenly interesting: 3-3 at the midpoint with the ground game humming and the defense trending up two weeks running. For a program that spent two years in the wilderness, that's not a moral victory anymore. That's a real football team.

More from Week 6: check our Ohio State-Notre Dame takeaways and the Georgia-Alabama showdown breakdown from earlier Saturday.