Defense
The defensive line suffered the biggest losses of any unit after the end of the 2017 season. One edge rusher, linebacker Frankie Luvu, graduated. The other starter, defensive end Hercules Mata’afa, declared early for the 2018 NFL Draft. Mata’afa, the Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year and a consensus All-American at his position, was not selected in the draft. Instead, he later signed as a free agent with the Minnesota Vikings.
The loss of these two players has forced new coordinator Tracy Claeys to spend much of the spring retooling the defensive line. In addition, the linebacking corps is going to be quite young in 2018. The unit, though talented, will be filled out by a group heavy on redshirt freshmen.
Similar concerns are found in the secondary, which lost a trio of graduated players from the starting 11. Breakdowns were evident throughout the spring game, despite the presence of upperclassmen in the two-deep in the defensive backfield.
Focusing on new defensive coordinator Tracy Claeys
A lot of these breakdowns can be attributed to learning a new system. When Alex Grinch left to take on a similar role at Ohio State, the Cougars quickly moved to bring in Tracy Claeys as a replacement.
Two years ago, Claeys was coaching a Minnesota team that nearly sat out the Holiday Bowl against Washington State. The Gophers were protesting the suspension of 10 teammates under investigation in a sexual assault case. Claeys was dismissed by the university for supporting his students’ First Amendment rights, and sat out the 2017 season.
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Fast forward a few years, and Claeys is back to being a defensive coordinator. He served on Jerry Kill’s staffs at Northern Illinois and Minnesota as a coordinator, and the biggest story of this offseason is not necessarily any one player but rather the coach that will steer the course of the entire unit.
Whether a young unit can quickly adjust to a new defensive philosophy will determine, as much as anything that happens with the offense, how well Washington State can perform in the Pac-12 North in 2018.