BYU Football: Ranking the nine position groups

As Fall Camp continues for BYU Football the strengths and weaknesses are becoming much clearer.

With the first few days in the books for BYU Fall Camp not a lot has been made overly clear. While this can be expected with only twenty minutes for the media to view (let’s be honest the coaches aren’t going to show anything during that time) and very generic interviews, fans and media members are left with more questions than they had before Fall Camp even began.

Based off of what I’ve seen and heard, the position groups are starting to take shape and it is becoming clear which ones are going to excel, and which ones will need to take advantage of every practice leading up to the Arizona game.

Rather than ranking every single position on the field, the position groups will be defensive line, linebackers, secondary, offensive line, running backs, receivers, tight ends, quarterbacks and special teams.

9. Defensive Line

There is one position that is really tough to learn anything from in practice and that is the defensive line. Because of that and because of previous predictions the defensive line remains the biggest question.

Under the Ilasi Tuiaki defensive scheme, the point of the defensive line isn’t to get sacks or to get into the backfield but to clog up the middle and force quarterbacks outside the pocket and allow playmakers to break up passes and get tackles outside the hashes.

Last season the Cougars only averaged 1.5 takeaways and 2.2 sacks per game but only allowed 15 points per game. Normally those kind of numbers would not go together, but BYU made it work.