GoldandBlack.com's 20-year Purdue player draft: Pick No. 54
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 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 shifts back to offense for her 14th pick.
Draft ticker: Nos. 1-53
With the top offensive tackles mostly off the board, I couldn’t wait any longer to nab my second starter. Fortunately, there still was a very good one left: Sean Sester.
Sester started 38 games in his first three seasons with the Boilermakers, including from start to finish as a redshirt freshman in 2005 when Purdue allowed a Joe Tiller Era-low nine sacks for the season. In his first three seasons, he was a two-time all-conference player — once at right tackle, where he played in his first two seasons but also at left tackle where he started 13 games in 2007.
The latter position is where Sester will be slotted for me, and his size (6-foot-7, 325 pounds) provides a great bookend to Kelly Butler. It gives me two mammoth guys on the edges, as well as two guys who played with the kind of intensity and fire I want on my O-line. Sester got the “Pitbull Award” in the spring of his junior season, exemplifying those characteristics.
And, of course, that healthy, three-year version of Sester is the one I’m picking. Not the one who had offseason back surgery that “shaved off part of the disc, the L4, L5 spot that was pinching the nerve in my leg” and hobbled him for much of his senior year.
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