Purdue tight end Paul Piferi has endured tough times throughout his college career and is now using those lessons as he becomes one of the team leaders for the Boilermakers heading into 2023.

"It's been a pretty good ride. Obviously, I'd be a liar if I told you it was easy. It's been a lot of hard nights and sleepless nights," Piferi said.

The Villa Park, California native committed to the Boilermakers in the summer of 2018, but he had no clue what his Boilermaker career would have in store for him. Piferi was the lone quarterback in the 2019 recruiting class for Jeff Brohm, coming in as a three-star recruit behind the likes of Elijah Sindelar, Jack Plummer, and Aidan O'Connell.

After redshirting his first year on campus, Piferi was expected to serve as depth in the quarterback room heading into 2020. That never came to fruition, however. A month into that season, then co-offensive coordinator JaMarcus Shephard shared that Piferi had moved to the tight end room for the Boilermakers.

A position change and the subsequent uphill battle as a tight end was something Piferi would never have expected when he came into college.

"If you would've told me back then, you know I was at 190 pounds. If you told me back then I'd be probably one of the top tight ends and one of the top guys for the team, one of the leaders of the team at 255 pounds. Even with playing experience, I'd probably think you were crazy," Piferi said.

Now, Piferi stands as a top tight end for Purdue heading into his redshirt-senior campaign. The former signal-caller has learned a lot about the game through all of the adversity and long nights. As he steps into a leadership role in the program, Piferi is looking to pass down that knowledge to the next wave of tight ends for the Boilermakers.

"I'm trying to show kind of the way – I've had to work really incredibly hard here at Purdue, you know, just from my own body weight from my own kind of position here, so I'm trying to really install that kind of level of hunger for play time, hunger for tight ends, trying to get that hard work really instilled in them," Piferi said.

In February, tight ends coach Seth Doege spoke about Piferi's leadership and smarts during winter workouts. Two aspects he believes will be invaluable for the Boilermakers next season.

"Obviously, Paul's extremely smart. So there's not one thing that really he messes up, especially when we go on walkthroughs and stuff like that. So he's very in tune to what we're doing already, and it's only been, you know, a couple of months," Doege said.