Draft Day: Building The Best Penn State Team from the Big Ten Era

Hello, and welcome to the inaugural BSD Penn State Football Draft!

What is this draft, you ask? Well, I’m here to help: With the NFL Draft in the rearview mirror and sports still far away, we at BSD wanted to bring you something special, so we devised a draft of our own. This past Sunday evening, myself, as well as Tim Aydin, Chris Lucia, Jared Slanina, Pat Koerbler, Marty Leap, Dylan Callaghan-Croley, and Lando sat down for three hours on Zoom and built our teams.

The goal of the draft was simple: Devise the best 23-player (11 O, 11 D, 1 specialist) player team you can out of Penn State players from the Big Ten era (1993-2019). We used a snake draft, with each person having 30 seconds on the clock to make picks. Going into the draft, participants built draft boards with over 175 names across each position. The only places where positions were not specific were at offensive line and linebacker, as well as one flex player on offense (running back, wideout, or tight end). Players that did not finish their career at Penn State were ineligible (i.e. Juwan Johnson, Shawn Oakman).

The order of the draft went as follows:

Tim Aydin

Marty Leap

Chris Lucia

Pat Koerbler

Jared Slanina

Lando

Dylan Callaghan-Croley

Clay Sauertieg.

Over the next eight days, starting this morning with Tim, we will be unveiling each of our teams with articles discussing our draft process, picks we liked, picks we didn’t like, and how we each thought we fared.

Following each of those said posts, we will match up their teams one-on-one with polls at the bottom of each article, and allow you all to vote on which team you feel is the best, until there is one true champion.

We hope you guys enjoy this series as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together, and let us know who we nailed, who we overlooked, and which of us is bound for a future gig as an NFL GM.