Post spring football series Part 7 — Defensive tackles

[Harry]

After a brief hiatus to cover some news of the day over the last week or so, it’s time to resume my post spring series look at UNT’s roster position by position.

Today, we move over to defensive tackles.

A year ago at this time, UNT appeared to be in a world of hurt at the position. UNT leaned on Kelvin Jackson and Shavod Atkinson in 2010 and lost both to graduation.

Head coach Dan McCarney vowed to play a lot of defensive linemen and rotate them, which was good idea in principle. The problem in 2010 and to a certain extent last year was UNT didn’t have enough guys who could play to rotate.

UNT ended up leaning on Richard Abbe, Tevinn Cantly and Ryan Boutwell, a trio of guys who was far from proven. Boutwell came into the year as an undersized converted defensive end. Abbe needed to lose weight. Cantly looked the part then and still does now, but had struggled to put it together on the field, due partly to a series of injuries.

The interesting part of the situation is that Dan McCarney is about as respected a defensive line guru as there is in college football.

The hope was he could work some magic, along with defensive line coach Mike Nelson.

Read more: http://meangreenblog.dentonrc.com/2012/06/post-spring-football-series-part-7-defensive-tackles.html/