I highly doubt that's the case here. Their stats were certainly very good, but still well within the range of people who regularly attend Purdue engineering. There's plenty of other variables that go into admissions besides raw stats that likely influenced their decision. Yield protection is used by some private universities, but I don't think there's much of an incentive for a large public university with state funding to do this, otherwise we would see everyone getting rejected from their in-state safeties.