Seeking fresh start, new kicker finds opportunities at Purdue

Having left Baylor in January 2016 after feeling he wasn’t being given a fair chance to be not only the Bears’ kickoff specialist but their field goal kicker, the Arlington, Texas native was without a football home.

The school he attended last academic year — UT-Arlington — didn’t have a program. But Evans kept working, hoping he’d get another chance. And that came when he started talking to Purdue special teams coordinator Tony Levine in February.

“Coach Levine really did an incredible job of making me feel welcome here, making me feel as though I had a home here,” Evans said Monday following Purdue’s fourth practice of training camp. “Everywhere else I talked to, I was excited and enjoyed it, but I really found a home here. It’s the place I wanted to be, it’s the place I’m excited to be.”

It helped too that Purdue assisted in getting Evans, a junior, cleared to play immediately. Because Arlington has Division I athletic programs, although not in football, the NCAA had ruled that Evans would need to sit out another season, in 2017-18, after transferring.

That ruined a chance to enroll at the University of Texas, where he had a scholarship offer, for the spring, and had caused others that were looking at him to cool.

But not Purdue.

Instead, Purdue compliance director Tom Mitchell helped facilitate the cause, starting a lengthy process that resulted in the NCAA’s clearance only about a week before the start of camp.

As part of his appeal, Evans had to submit a personal statement to the NCAA, explaining why he’d left Baylor.

“And also, why Purdue was the best place for me to go,” said Evans, a selling and sales management major at Purdue. “(It was a better) long-term (outlook) in terms of my future, my career, on and off the field. They wanted to know why it was the best place for me, so I wrote down the statement, turned it in. They reviewed it and asked me a couple questions, went a little back-and-forth, and eventually they deemed that I was immediately eligible and ready to go.”

Purdue’s kicking need became apparent to Levine soon after the assistant arrived on campus. In reviewing film — and statistics — from last season, he saw that incumbent kickoff man J.D. Dellinger had only seven touchbacks in 54 attempts. And although the Boilermakers’ coverage unit was good, its average starting position against was not.

“Coach (Jeff) Brohm has traditionally been strong offensively, so if you’re going to lead the nation in scoring, like we did a year ago (at Western Kentucky), then you’re probably going to be in the top two or three in the nation in terms of kickoffs. That’s very important to me. That, to me, is the first defensive play of the series,” Levine said. “… That’s something that coming out of spring ball, I wanted to try to address, at least add some depth to our program, if we could find someone with a leg to kick the ball near or across the goal line.”

Evans, who says he’s on scholarship at Purdue, has done that; in his last season in 2015 at Baylor, Evans averaged 60 yards on his kickoffs and had 39 touchbacks. But with thoughts toward getting an NFL opportunity after graduation, Evans also wants a chance to kick field goals. He wasn’t getting that in Waco.

“I personally felt like I was really attacking and winning the competition every day,” he said of his two-year tenure at Baylor “You can ask a lot of the other guys around there, they felt like I should have been field goal kicking down there. But regardless, the past is the past. I’m excited that Coach Levine has given me the opportunity to come in and have a fair competition, to go to work. He’s going to put the best guy on the field and that’s how it should be. If I get beat out in practice, then that’s who should be on the field.”

Levine says the competition, between Evans, Dellinger (who hit 10-of-14 as a freshman last season) and walk-on Myles Homan, is ongoing, likely to be decided in the middle of next week. It’ll be numbers’ based, Levine said, with each of the three getting opportunities under the same conditions, like with the first-team holder and snapper.

Evans tried to stay active last year at Arlington, practicing on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays before simulating games on Saturdays.

“I worked very hard in the offseason and really strengthened in that aspect,” he said of placekicking. “So I think I’ll be able to do well. But we’ll see how the competition unfolds.”