For those Boilermaker football fans of the most optimistic sort, the ones who have gold and black flags flying on their porches and whose grandpa’s grandpa went to Purdue, I have good news for you: Purdue might go to a bowl game this year.

The chance it happens just starts with four zeros.

After some math, I calculated the probability that Purdue wins its final five games. And the odds it wins four of them. And three. And so on.

My findings are less than cheery. They tell me that there is just a hair better than a 50/50 chance Purdue wins any more games at all. A 51.4% chance, in fact.

And they tell me this weekend’s game against Northwestern could be the key.

I started with the win probabilities for each game left on Purdue’s schedule, generated by College Football Insiders' matchups tool.

You simply plug the away and home teams in, and the site spits out a score projection and percentage chance for each team to win based on the array of advanced stats it curates.

It looks like this:

Nick Dimmit, a staff member of the site, was kind enough to explain how it all works over email:

“The win probabilities mainly incorporate the offensive and defensive EPA (expected points added) statistics while also taking into account success rates, average starting field positions, and home field advantage. The statistics are also weighted for opponent strength, so if a team has only played mediocre competition all season, their offensive and defensive statistics account for that.”

So, in plain English, the chances are found by comparing teams’ offenses by how explosive and consistent they are while accounting for a few other important variables, and comparing defenses by how well they limit opponents in those same factors.

Once I had win chances for each game remaining on the Boilermakers’ schedule, I used something called a Poisson binomial distribution to do the rest. It uses an equation to find all the different ways those last five games can go, and from that range of outcomes finds the likelihood of a specific one, like winning all of them.

Purdue’s chances the rest of the year go like this:

Somehow, with Indiana becoming a Big Ten power, a schedule murderous when printed in January got even worse. And as you can see, Northwestern is the last shot the Boilers have at a competitive football game on paper.

If Purdue loses, its chances to win an FBS game (and avoid infamous history) fall to just 23%.

In 2013, Darrell Hazell’s Purdue team did almost exactly what this year’s Boilers are trying to avoid: it beat Indiana State early in the year and lost the rest of its games.

As it turns out, that 2013 team was the only Purdue squad since the Great Depression with no wins against top-division opponents – that's the FBS and Division 1-A before it.

To be exact, 1922 was the last time Purdue was so inept, and that team at least tied Indiana in the final game of the season.

There have been close calls before. But in several campaigns, none other than Northwestern has succumbed to the Boilermakers and helped them stave off history, most recently in 1990. The Wildcats were also Purdue’s only top-division win in 1942, 1923 and 1921 (when Purdue lost to Wabash).

Ryan Walters said Monday that the No. 1 thing he wanted to see from his team the next five weeks is a win.

There’s a coin flip’s chance of it. Anyone got a quarter?