Bevy of backs delivered for Purdue

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Each day, they know why they stand.

Chris Barclay leaves no room for entitlement. No room for complaining. No room for questioning.

Each day when Purdue running backs walk into their position meeting room, their mistakes, their reps, their status is scribbled on the board for all to see. Including what position coach Barclay called the “stock market” — a trending column that has color-coded progress reports, a green up arrow signifying an uptick, a blue mark identifying no change and a red down arrow signifying a drop in performance.

“One of my favorite quotes is J.J. Watt and it’s, ‘Success is not owned. It’s leased. And rent is due every day.’ I don’t believe in, ‘I’m going to rest on what I did last week.’ Today is a new day. The minute you start thinking about what you did yesterday, it means you haven’t done anything today,” Barclay said after Friday’s practice. “So it’s always just a reminder that you’ve got to stay hungry, you’ve always got to find ways to improve because there’s always a guy who’s on your heels looking to get better.

“I think it’s a reward system. Since I got here, if you had a bad week of practice, you probably weren’t going to play much that week. If you were lazy, didn’t go to class, you’re probably not going to play. But if you did everything right, you had a good week in practice, yeah, you’ll be in the plans. But it’s also just a way to get guys out of the (mindset of), ‘Oh, I don’t have to practice, I’m just going to show up on Saturday.’ No. If you don’t practice, you don’t play. Not for me.”

That moment-to-moment accountability played a key piece in fueling the Boilermakers’ backs this season.

If they thought they should have been graded better and opted to voice that opinion, Barclay made sure to give a detailed tally of why they weren’t. Maybe the player didn’t show an ability to finish runs. Maybe the player didn’t have good pad level. Maybe the player couldn’t pick up a blitz.

Backs always knew where they stood.

For competitors, not being at the top of the list just wasn’t acceptable.

“We have it and it says your numbers, the order of the day, so every day I wasn’t 1 or 2, if I was 3 or 4 or the last spot, I take that personally. That just really fuels the energy of the room,” junior Markell Jones said Friday. “If a guy sees himself last, he doesn’t want to be that in position, so he’s going to work harder. Then once you pass the dude in front of you, he’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did I get passed? Now I have to work harder.’ So that’s really the competition in the room. As much as we love each other, there’s still that brotherly competitiveness. So that just made us work super hard, especially whenever we started breaking off big plays.

“Doing it for ourselves and also for the rest of the team, they just love it when we run hard. Bring it every day.”

Certainly Barclay’s choices changed with the season’s ebbs and flows — projected starter Jones, the team’s leading rusher the last two seasons, got hurt in Week 1; the next starter Tario Fuller was hurt in Week 3; and sometimes-starter Richie Worship suffered a season-ending knee injury in Big Ten play. Sometimes-starter D.J. Knox was the consistent healthy body, but Jones also returned midseason and was a factor again.

But, still, no matter who was available, it seemed that back always was ready for the bigger role that Barclay requested.

In Fuller’s two full-time games as starter, he rushed for 142 yards against Ohio and added 90 against Missouri. Worship bullied his way to an 89-yard game against Nebraska. Knox had an 85-yard rushing game against Illinois and an 84-yarder against Rutgers. Jones finished the season with a 74-yard game at Iowa before ripping Indiana for a whopping 217 rushing yards on a season-high — for any back — 31 carries.

“No matter who it was in the room, they always (stepped up). That’s one thing I was so proud about the room we had,” Knox said this week. “Because a year ago, they were talking about how the room needed to do a little bit better or we needed more performance from the room. Then this year, we come in and everybody has a chip on their shoulder in the room. I think you can attribute that to Coach giving everybody equal opportunity within the room. So when each guy got his shot, he did the best he could and it was good enough to help the team.

“I just applaud everybody in the room. I respect them, and I want to thank those guys for giving their best when their number was called.”

With that final two-game flourish, Jones rose to the top of the individual rushing category, finishing with 480 yards in nine games. Knox was just behind with 460 yards. Fuller added 267 and Worship had 257 with a team-high three rushing TDs.

Purdue has one more game — it practiced for the first time Friday for bowl prep, getting ready to play Arizona on Dec. 27 in Santa Clara, Calif. — so it’s likely the team’s leading rusher will bump up over 500 yards. But, as of now including this season, only twice since 1991 has Purdue’s leading rusher had so few yards. (Akeem Hunt had 464 in 2013.)

Barclay prefers to have a workhorse-type back, but when that simply couldn’t happen this year, in part because of those injuries, in part because of how he chose to ride the hot back, he quickly became OK with it.

Their 1,458 combined rushing total still wasn’t too shabby. Neither was that combined 5.5 yards per carry average.

“When I first got here in the winter, I told them, ‘We’re going to be the best unit in the Big Ten.’ Now, we may not have accomplished that from a statistics standpoint. But I thought, just from a stepping up and accepting our role and taking advantage of the opportunities that we had, I thought we did a great job with that this year,” Barclay saod. “We really came through for our team on multiple occasions and were big in some games. In this last game in particular, I thought Markell’s performance just spoke volumes of him just accepting the opportunity that he had, and he really took advantage of it. He showed out Saturday. All those guys throughout the course of the season had their moments and that was encouraging as a coach.”

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