To help commemorate the 20-year anniversary of Purdue's magical turnaround 1997 season, GoldandBlack.com's staff will break up the rosters and select the best players to wear a Boilermaker uniform since Coach Joe Tiller's first season on the sidelines.
GoldandBlack.com's 20-year Purdue player draft will have 100 players chosen — two picks each weekday over the next 10 weeks. Boilermakers who were on Purdue rosters between 1997-2017 are eligible for selection. The draft order is Alan Karpick, Stacy Clardie, Kyle Charters and Brian Neubert.
Neubert has Pick No. 16 ...
Draft ticker: Picks No. 1-15
From the outset of these fun, but futile, exercise, there was one guy perhaps over all others whose names don't rhyme with 'Blue Trees' I targeted for my team, and I now have him.
Purdue's had a lot of really, really productive offensive players over these past two decades, but they haven't had many talented enough to play anywhere in the country. In Dorien Bryant, I have one of the few who was.
He was rocket fast, super-athletic and incredibly versatile. He's an offensive talent I can build my whole team fake team around, a player I can get the fake football to a dozen-plus times a game in any number of different ways — whether it's fake screens, fake option routes, fake deep balls, fake reverses, even fake kick returns if we were doing that. He can put ultimate pressure on fake defenses to have to chase that Roadrunner around.
Meep meep.
Anyway, I am building my team around raw talent, but also pressure. I want a big-play defense that's going to make quarterbacks quiver and I want big-play skill on offense that's going to make defenses worry on every snap.
Bryant might be the best Purdue's had in terms of doing just that.
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Remember Purdue's 20-13 win at Penn State in 2004, when the Boilermakers were clinging to a lead of just four under the lights in a marquee game and faced third-and-14 in their own territory with under eight to play, with the Lions gaining significant momentum? Kyle Orton was forced to just get rid of it, tossing to Bryant way short of the marker. Bryant, though, embarrassed the would-be tackler that came his way, accelerated past him and everyone else for 17 yards. Purdue kicked a field goal, then won, continuing a stretch of the best football it's played in these past two decades.
That was the biggest play of that game, and the sort of play that stands as the reason I wanted Bryant more than any other skill offensive player on the table here.
Was he as decorated as some of the receivers Purdue had under Joe Tiller? Maybe not. Should he have been? How many others have caught 80 or more passes three seasons in a row? I'll take nearly 4,000 yards from scrimmage in his career in a heartbeat. Had he had a little more stability around him on those offenses and in those locker rooms back in those days, who knows what he might have been capable of?
This was Pick 16, a pretty high pick, but I really feel like I stole one here.
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