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24 GOLD AND BLACK ILLUSTRATED in 2014. Plenty of potential suitors started calling then, the likes of USC, Oregon, Arizona, Michigan State, Purdue and a bunch of others. But the recruitment turned complicated. Hedelin had a problem; those games in Spain … A s it turns out, they mattered. Because the three-game stint in Spain came more than two years after the end of his high school graduation, the NCAA deemed them non-amateur, even though he wasn't paid. And so, the NCAA decided to suspend Hedelin for a whole season. He Skyped his parents with the news. "We were sitting on this sofa here one-and-a-half years ago," Anders said via Skype from Stockholm, where he and his wife Berit reside again now, "and he was crying. He knew that the career was over when we got that NCAA information. "It was a really, really tough period." Imagine it. Hedelin had put so much into this dream, traveling across the world for the opportunity, only to have it snuffed out for a reason many thought frivolous. He fig- ured, for good reason, that no major Division I program would want to invest in an offensive lineman that had only a year of eligibility. What would be the point in that? "It was basically over," he said. But Michigan State, where he had committed, took up the cause and got the penalty reduced to five games. But then the Spartans did a curious thing: They asked Hedelin if he would like them to keep trying to reduce it fur- ther. That was a turnoff. If MSU re- ally wanted him, Hedelin thought, wouldn't it have kept pressure on the NCAA? Why'd it need to ask him? Signing day came and went with- out Hedelin inking with the Spartans. Meanwhile, Purdue was working, put- ting together a well-packaged appeal to the NCAA — Hedelin gave credit to the school's staff as well as his parents for gathering up needed information, from bank transactions to statements from the Firebats — to knock the suspension down to three games. With the appeal happening quietly behind-the-scenes, it caught many by surprise when Hedelin signed with Purdue. "I felt like the coaches here gave me more love," he said, "so I came here." It was a boon for Purdue. The Boilermakers were in serious need of a tackle in Hazell's first Purdue class and had only 400-plus-pound project Corey Clements signed, after Miguel Machado spurned the Boilermakers at the last moment for the Spartans. "We had a desperate need for him," Hazell said. "We really did. I thought our staff did an unbelievable job of staying on it, staying the course and making sure that we gave ourselves a chance in that process and it's going to pay off for us this year. We've got to get the most out of him, that's for sure, during his last five months." E cho — the word itself — caused Hedelin problems in his first year at Purdue. He can speak the language fine, along with Swed- ish and Spanish, better now than when he first arrived in the United States a few years ago, but the language of foot- Download... An updated GoldandBlack.com mobile App For the Android and iPhone at Google Play and the App Store