GoldandBlack.com's 20-year Purdue player draft: Pick No. 34
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.
Clardie looks to solidify her defense with her ninth-round pick.
Draft ticker: No. 1-33
After going maybe outside of the box for my last selection — and that'll happen more this draft — figured would make sense to take perhaps the next-best linebacker on the board to solidify the middle of my defense.
Hard to feel better about a guy than Willie Fells, who led the Boilermakers for three consecutive seasons in tackles from 1997-1999. In those three seasons that included 34 starts, he racked up 323 tackles. His career total of 341, including a whopping 199 solo, ranks No. 13 all-time.
Perhaps Fells is best known, though, for a play that had nothing to do with a tackle.
With Purdue clinging to a 28-23 lead against Notre Dame in 1999, the Irish had the ball near the goal line and called a timeout with 16 seconds left. After that third-down play was smothered, Fells essentially sat on the football — to hide it from the referees — to allow the clock to run. It prevented Notre Dame from getting a from snap and preserved a Purdue victory.
It was a play that best exemplified Fells' personality, he's said, as an intelligent player who always was thinking a step ahead but also as a guy who loved the game and wanted to have fun playing it.
That approach served Purdue well during Fells' career and also will mesh perfectly with my defense — if we're talking personalities, there's certainly a mix on my unit, especially in the secondary, and Fells' leadership would be a nice influence there.
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