Gold and Black Radio: Ex-Boilers sign UDFA deals after Purdue has no players selected in NFL Draft
Host Derek Schultz and GoldandBlack.com Purdue football writers Tom Dienhart and Dub Jellison discuss the NFL Draft coming and going without any 2025 Boilermakers being selected, look to the future of the program and more in our April 28 edition.
Excerpt from Brian Neubert’s Three Thoughts From The Weekend column, on GoldandBlack.com:
ON PURDUE FOOTBALL AND THE NFL
Obviously, the Ryan Walters Era — if you can call 24 games an “era” — was an abject failure at Purdue.
But I will say this after loosely paying attention to the NFL Draft this weekend: Nic Scourton and Dillon Thieneman owe him. And Will Heldt next season.
It would be difficult to say Ryan Walters and his staff, in their brief time at Purdue Boilermakers football, developed those NFL Draft picks, but he did give them opportunities to show what they can do early in their careers and systematically put them in positions to stand out right away. He didn’t recruit any of them, really, but he did cut them loose in a system that played to their strengths.
That didn’t help Purdue all that much, as the Unregulated NIL Era ripped the Boilermaker program apart before Walters’ inevitable firing. But it did really help those players. It made those guys a lot of money, both at the college level and now, or soon, in the NFL.
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About this weekend’s Purdue draft shutout: For many years, the program took great pride in having players drafted every single year. Obviously, these are not high times for the Boilermaker program on the field, but it’s also a different landscape.
All those NFL players before were generally recruits that Purdue either identified and developed in a way that maybe not everyone else could have. Now, it’s about the portal. Recruiting NFL players out of high school is one thing. Recruiting them off the transfer wire is another.
You still have to identify and recruit Dillon Thienemans at Purdue, but you have to keep them. Keeping them is in part about money, but more so it’s about winning. Purdue had no chance to keep any of its best players after its coaching change because the situations they were attracted to not only were better from a financial perspective, but they were big-time programs where players were going to win. Purdue has fallen out of that strata over the last several years.
Retention is part of development, and winning is part of retention.
