It’s a line of scrimmage league –
Part 2 – Defensive Line
In 2018 Football Outsiders ranked our defensive line #104 in the nation and our rushing defense ranked #55 in yards allowed per rushing attempt. In 2019, our DLine ranking moved up to #95 and our run defense moved up to #30 in yards allowed per rushing attempt. In 2020 our DL moved up to #45 and held at #30 for yards allowed per rushing attempt. Last year with a scheme change our DL fell to #88 but we only slid to #36 in yards allowed per rushing attempt. In fact the yards we gave up per rushing attempt in 2019 (3.70), 2020 (3.68), and 2021 (3.71) are the only 3 years since 2008 that we’ve limited opponents to less than 4.00 yards per rushing attempt.
The only losses on our DL from last year are Butler and Tremblay.
These are the pff season grades for our DL last year (including # of plays graded):
Butler (664 plays) 75.8
Young (399 plays) 75.6
Simmons (157 plays) 75.3
Terry (251 plays) 74.0
Baron (395 plays) 69.7
Bumphus (142 plays) 68.1
Thomas (301 plays) 66.5
Harrison (335 plays) 63.0
Tremblay (399 plays) 61.2
We obviously return a lot of guys on the DL from last year and I expect with CRG they will continue to improve. Young was mostly a rookie last year but he’s garnered some preseason all-sec accolades already coming into his 2nd year with us. Additionally, we have some new young talented reinforcements now on campus to further strengthen this group. I think most people think the DL will be our strongest position group on that side of the ball this year, and with good reason. jmo.
Latrell Bumphus is the player I think may surprise this year. Out of high school he was projected to be a WDE by the services and rated a 4-star by ESPN & Rivals. CRG only had positive things to say about him during the spring. Butch put him at TE (where he excelled in HS) when he first got to campus in 2017 and Pruitt left him there in 2018 but moved him to the DL in 2019 and 2020. He had a knee injury in late 2020 but has been steadily coming back. He started against Alabama last year. In any event I think his athleticism and maturity could be a huge advantage as he continues to progress as a DT on our line. I think Bumphus is about 0.4 seconds faster than the average DT and that’s one of the assets he brings to the interior of our DL. jmo.
This is my thinking on our defensive front for this year. First, as has been said, football is a developmental game and for most I think the idea is that kids need to play in order to developed. Last year, similar to Bumphus, we had other guys that were learning on the job, including Byron Young. That’s going to pay off this year but the position group where we may (hopefully) get the most payoff is at linebacker.
There are things that you can only learn by playing the position, instincts and anticipation, quickly reading your keys, recognizing personnel and formations, etc. For most of the season last year we only had 3 linebackers. Mitchell got hurt and that left Banks, Beasley, and Page. This year we’ve got a few more bodies but maybe more importantly Banks (a converted RB) and Beasley (a converted Safety) have a lot of snaps under their belts from last year. Banks had 659 snaps graded last year and Beasley had 685 snaps graded by PFF.
Their grades weren’t anything to write home about but probably somewhere between 80-90% of the snaps each has played in their entire football careers at linebacker happened last year and against some of the very best offenses in the nation. The offenses for the 6 games we lost were OM (6), UA (7), Pitt (8), UF (15), UGA (25), and Purdue (33). We beat every team we played with an offense ranked below Purdue.
Banks & Beasley were our two leading tacklers and while it’s important to qualify that by noting that NFL scouts don’t care how many tackles a kid makes but where on the field he makes them, it’s my contention that experience most often leads to improvement, both physically and mentally. I think last year we were just playing aggressively because maybe that’s the best we could do. This year we have the opportunity owing to our experience to play smarter, especially at the point of attack. If we can do this we can maybe reduce our yards allowed per rushing attempt by somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.6 yards per attempt. That would give our rushing defense a shot at being in the top 10 in the nation. jmo.
