GoldandBlack.com's 20-year Purdue player draft: Pick No. 29
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.
Karpick has Pick No. 29 ...
Matt Mitrione earned the nickname "Meathead."
And some would argue that reputation continues in his current day job in MMA. (See video below.)
But Mitrione was a pretty good interior defensive lineman at Purdue, earning All-Big Ten selection in 2001. It would be a decade before another Boilermaker defensive tackle would earn such an honor (Kawann Short, 2011).
And I kind of like my team because in theory it would be fun to watch Chukky Okobi and Mitrione square off in practice as they did during their college days playing for Coach Joe Tiller.
Mitrione redshirted out of Tiller's first recruiting class, and was a late signee at that. As Purdue fans have heard for years, it was a class that was dead last in the Big Ten in the rankings, but ultimately produced five first-team All-Big Ten selections (Akin Ayodele, Drew Brees, Mitrione, Vinny Sutherland and Tim Stratton).
Meat was a hard guy to block. His 50 career tackles for loss is seventh overall and second to Jeff Zgonina among defensive tackles. His 10 career sacks put him in the Boilermakers' top-20 all-time.
He was active as a defensive tackle, and that fit perfectly with the fact that his mouth was usually pretty active too. But his off-the-wall-character fits pretty well with my defense that has three defensive linemen who can get up field pretty quickly.
Few have done that better than Mitrione for the interior of the defense. And the fact that I have three of those five All-Big Ten selections from that '97 class means that in the mythical team building, familiarity likely won't breed contempt.
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