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The Best Player I Played With: A player's perspective, Travis Dorsch

Player perspective series: Joe Holland | Chris Clopton | Ryan Kerrigan

"Catching Up" series ($): Akin Ayodele | Matt Light | Bernard Pollard

GoldandBlack.com's 20-year player draft ticker: No. 1-41

GoldandBlack.com staff is making its decisions about Purdue's best players since 1997 with a 20-year player draft that'll run through July.

In conjunction with the draft, we also will check in with former Boilermakers to get their perspectives on the best players they played with during their careers. They offer up behind-the-scenes looks at intense work ethics, how players got the most out of their teammates and even reflect on funny stories during their days together.

Next up, kicker/punter Travis Dorsch, a great player in his own right who also played with a boatload of excellent players from 1998-2001, as told to Stacy Clardie:

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"Everybody has to start by mentioning Drew (Brees). He’s Mr. Purdue. Obviously getting a chance to overlap with him by three years played a significant role in the success that I and Purdue were able to achieve as a team. He’ll always be remembered as one of the two or three best players at Purdue. You throw in Leroy (Keyes) and Mike Alstott and some others, but Drew is right there. So if you ask straight up, who’s the best player you played with? Drew’s going to be the top.

"But, as I was thinking about this, I want to shed some light on some more unique names that haven’t been mentioned for a number of reasons. I think they all have their own individual stories.

"One name that comes to my mind right away is Chris Daniels. He’s someone maybe not a lot of people would think about when you ask about the best player you’d played with. He’s a tall, slow, white guy who — and this is the very reason I bring him up — not only maximized his potential but maybe outperformed his potential when he was at Purdue. He really was a guy for Drew when we needed to convert a third down, he was that guy every time. I think back to that Michigan State game, and I’m maybe going to get the numbers a little off, but it was 21 catches for 301 yards, something like that, just off-the-charts ridiculous. I think in addition to the accolades, to that All-American season, to being the glue that really held our offense together, he was just a consummate teammate. For the lowly kicker at the end of the bench, for the redshirt freshman who most people didn’t know their name, for the guys who maybe weren’t the headline names, that means a lot to have an older guy, a veteran guy to stick up for everybody on the team and, again, kind of be that glue and act as that glue. When you define ‘best player,’ it can be stats, it can be a lot of things. But I also think you have to throw in how good of a teammate is a guy, and he was maybe the best that I played with.

"Another name that came to mind that was sort of in the next cycle of athletes my age was Akin Ayodele. Akin was just a freak, and I use that word in the most complimentary sense of how it can be interpreted. He’s a guy who the minute he stepped on the field, people knew he was going to be a force to be reckoned with. He wasn’t the tallest and maybe wasn’t necessarily the strongest in terms of leverage at that position — you had guys who were bigger outside like Rosevelt (Colvin) and others — but he was a guy who was sort of the ’tweener hybrid linebacker/defensive end that I think just … I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in offensive coordinators' rooms from the teams we played because he just had to scare the heck out of people. ‘How are we going to control this guy? How are we going to get him out of our way?’ To me, he always had sort of a quiet business approach about him as well. He’s a guy that, while hilarious and readily available to joke around in the locker room, he was a guy that when it was time to strap it up and play, he was all business. That really came through at the next level where it really is a business. But in the short time he was at Purdue — he had the issues initially with his recruiting and enrollment, didn’t get to play his full time at Purdue — but in the time he did spend on campus, I think he impacted a lot of people in their approach to the game and the professional approach we took to being on the practice field and lacing it up on Saturdays.

"If you could create an athlete, you would create it in the mold of Akin. He just oozes athleticism when you see him moving. He’s a guy, a common theme among what I’m saying, he’s another guy who maximized his potential and figured it out, grew up and matured and learned to treat it like a job, which it was.

"Chris and Akin were the two I immediately thought about as the two, as I reflect on it, that had an impact on me.

"The other thing about Akin — he and I both because we were in the same graduating class — we both spent a couple years in the glory days with the Outback and then Rose Bowl teams, a couple of New Year’s Day bowls, then our senior years, after Drew graduated and some of those other key seniors, Matt Light and some others, then we go and have a 6-6 season our senior year. And it really took all we could muster to pull out those six wins and get ourselves to another bowl game. We had a very young team, a lot of freshmen, young guys. Akin as the leader on our defense, we didn’t necessarily have a leader emerge on offense that year, and with me as the leader on special teams, we had to pull all the right strings, and I remember Akin being a guy who was able to do that. He was really able to be a quarterback on the defense, get people in the right position, help out the youngsters like Stu Schweigert, who was back there in the secondary, and others who were full of athleticism but maybe a little bit green. I think Akin was a great quarterback in that sense for our defense."

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