GoldandBlack.com's Purdue player draft: Pick No. 13
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.
Karpick has the first pick of the fourth round, No. 13 overall, and takes ...
Draft Ticker: 1-12
The best running back in the Tiller Era? In my very humble opinion it is Joey Harris. At least for one season (2002) he was.
Now, the argument for the best back title could be made for Kory Sheets, who came around three years later. After all, Sheets was effective in four seasons, and his greatest season (2008) was 16 rushing yards better than Harris.
But there was something about Harris that I couldn't resist. There was so much potential, and Purdue fans saw flashes of it. And for the sake of this draft, the ability to have his power and speed along with a quarterback like Drew Brees was too good to pass up.
We just didn't see enough of Harris to know for sure. Harris was academically ineligible as a freshman, and ruled in ineligible his senior year, when the conservative Boilermaker offense of 2003 could have really used him to take it up another notch.
He had speed, burst, power and maybe the fact we never saw him fully develop at Purdue made me think, quite possibly, he was better than he was.
But Joey Harris was a really good college back. And to have that type of running ability with Brees' ability to get him the ball in space where Harris could use his near-blinding speed, and a line anchored by Matt Light, was too much for me to pass up.
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