GoldandBlack.com's 20-year Purdue player draft: Pick No. 6
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 day over the next 10 weeks. Boilermakers who were on the Purdue roster between 1997-2017 are eligible for selection. The draft order is Alan Karpick, Stacy Clardie, Kyle Charters and Brian Neubert.
With her second pick, Clardie takes ...
Draft ticker: No. 1 | No. 2 | No. 3 | No. 4 | No. 5
In a bit of a not-like-me approach, I'm sticking with defense for my second pick and grabbing one of the biggest playmaking defensive backs in Purdue's history.
Stuart Schweigert was a ball-hawking safety from nearly the moment he stepped on campus, breaking up a team-best 10 passes and snatching five interceptions as a rookie. Those five picks were the most by a true freshman in school history and set the tone for a dominating individual career.
By the time Schweigert was done, he’d intercepted a school-record 17 passes, including having two apiece in back-to-back regular-season games. His first two-interception game was in that phenomenal freshman season, against Indiana to help Purdue clinch a Rose Bowl berth. The success of that first season had him thinking, “This college thing is freaking easy,” he joked after his career was over.
Schweigert wasn’t only about making plays when the ball was in the air, though. As a rangy safety who covered a lot of ground, he was an eraser in other ways.
He was one of the team's surest tacklers over his career. As a freshman, he even led the team in that category (with 85) and continued to rack up tackles in his final three seasons. His 363 career tackles rank ninth all-time — and, as relates to our 20-year draft period, that's more than anyone since 1997.
Among his 88 tackles as a senior, eight of them were TFLs, including 2.5 sacks.
Adding value to the pick here, there may not be that much quality depth at the safety spot over the last 20 years. Bernard Pollard would be the next-best over that span, but after that?
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