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Being very thin on the offensive line, Purdue could have a couple freshmen play at defensive tackle this season. It is a move out of necessity, but today's player could be ready to go in that department.
Anthony Watts - Fr.
Houston, TX (Yates HS)
6'4", 290 pounds
Defensive Tackle
2016 Projection: Contributor at Defensive Tackle
First off, we need to separate Watts from another Anthony Watts, a blogger who denies climate change even though he studied (but did not graduate) from Purdue. This Anthony Watts comes from Yates HS in Houston and was offered by California, Colorado State, and Kansas before committing to Purdue. His team was 4-6 last season, and I could not find many stats for him.
He was projected mostly as a 3-star prospect by the recruiting services, however, so he could be an immediate contributor. What I like about him was that he instigated getting all the 2016 commits to talk together well before arriving in West Lafayette:
GoldandBlack.com: So you're going to room with another Houston guy, Lorenzo Neal. He said you guys like live down the street from each other?
Watts: "We live like 10 minutes away from each other. We didn't just meet until after I committed. When I found there was another kid from Houston they were recruiting, I took initiative to text him. After I committed, I was like, ‘What if I don't wait until we get to the campus to become a family with the recruits?' I thought, ‘How about I start a huge group message with every single commit and we get to talking now?' So it was about December, and I get on Twitter and I just start searching every person who committed to Purdue. So we're all in one big group message, talking every day. Now, I can say that every single one of us are close with each other because of that group message. In the spring, we all made a plan to all come to the spring game together. So we finally all met together at the spring game, and that was one of the funnest weekends I had this year because we were all together having fun game. I can say we're all like brothers right now. I feel like this is probably closest recruiting class that Purdue has had because we've been talking for awhile now."