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Texas added Louisville transfer DT Jermayne Lole last week and it looks like that'll probably wrap up this offseason's efforts to shore up the Longhorns defensive front given the losses of T'Vondre Sweat and Byron Murphy and general lack of experience along the interior DL.
What is Texas getting in Lole and how does he fit in?
First off, if the staff is looking to bolster the room with experience, they're certainly getting it in Lole who will be playing in his seventh season of college football in 2024. I'm unable to find his year of birth, but with a birthday listed on various scouting sites as April 6th, that means Lole -- who was a freshman in 2018 -- is either currently 25 years old unless he was 17 for basically his entire freshman year of college at Arizona State, which seems unlikely. We're talking about a guy here who appears to be 3.5 years older than the recently departed Byron Murphy and a little over a year older than Dallas Cowboys star defender Micah Parsons.
In 2018 at Arizona State (starting his college career at defensive end), Lole played on defense in every game as a freshman, earning a starting role for the final four games of the year versus UCLA, Oregon, Arizona and the Sun Devils' bowl game against Fresno State, where he generated TFLs in all but one of them.
In 2019, Lole really broke onto the scene. Per the ASU Athletics Department: "Recorded 72 tackles this season, the third most for a Sun Devil defensive lineman since 1990 behind only Shante Carver (79 in 1993) and Terrell Suggs (73 in 2002)... His 37 defensive stops in the regular season led the nation's defensive interior linemen – two more than any other lineman in the nation… Credited with just a single missed tackle this season, tied for fourth among FBS defensive linemen… Checks in as the 16th-highest graded player in the Pac-12 with a score of 75.4 – the second-highest score among edge defenders in the league… His 81.5 score on running plays this season is 39th among edge defenders nationally… Had the 12th-highest positive run impact score in the country at 23.6 percent among players graded as interior linemen (percentage of run defense snaps where player earned a positive grade from Pro Football Focus)... Led the team with five sacks and finished second on the team with 8.5 tackles for loss… Controlled the line of scrimmage in the Sun Devils' upset road win over No. 18 Michigan State, collecting eight tackles, a tackle for loss, and a sack… Consistent performer who showed up in every game, as he was credited with at least a half a tackle for loss in 10 of 12 games this season… Recorded a career-high two tackles for loss and also recovered a fumble at No. 13 Utah… Made 20 tackles over the final three games… Earned Pac-12 Defensive Lineman of the Week honors on September 16th."
The 2020 season at ASU was shortened by the coronavirus, but in the four games that Lole played that year (having that season moved inside to interior DL), he had a uber-productive four sacks, 2 QB hits and 12 QB pressures per (the often cockamamie) PFF. Remember, he was playing a 3-tech by this point and that kind of disruption is gonzo. He was playing like a monster and adding on to the legitimate NFL draft buzz that started in 2019, his best cumulative statistical season. He returned for the 2021 campaign, and in fall camp, tore his triceps and missed the season. In 2022, he transferred to Louisville and played two games before suffering a season-ending elbow injury. He returned in 2023 to be the player at UL that we're going to talk about in this column.
At this point, I have a hard time telling if Lole is allowed this one more season to play college football at Texas due to COVID-related rules, a medical redshirt or some combination of both.
I watched two Louisville games that I thought would be representative of the type of opponent Texas will be facing in 2024: Kentucky (who Texas will indeed face) and Florida State (a good team that Louisville faced in the ACC championship).
@Ketchum has mentioned in passing that Lole is the Jalen Catalon of defensive tackles. That is to say, that he is a player who has shown truly high-level talent early on in his career, only to end up in the proverbial dented-can aisle of college prospects due to injuries and a perceived derailment of his initial bit of runway. I think it is a fair way to compartmentalize the overall profile of a player like Lole, but the main difference I see in the two is that Lole still definitely has juice. It was easy to tell right off the bat that much of Catalon's juice had been sufficiently sapped over the years.
Louisville had a really good defense in 2023. They stunted like crazy, ran all sorts of twists and games with their interior defensive line and edge-rushers (by the way, keep an eye out for No.9 Ashton Guilotti in the 2025 NFL draft - he's a real problem). These two games happened to be against two of the most gifted running backs they faced all season in Ray Davis and Trey Benson (both NFL draft selections in 2024) so, it was a good sampling of games versus SEC-style slashers in the opposing run game. Lole is really good on his feet and uses his hands like the edge-rusher he once was when he can generate space. He can be somewhat frenetic at times in his movements, a hair-on-fire style that led to one missed tackle on the two-game review, but also a trait you'd take over sluggishness every day of the week.
Over the 62 snaps charted, Lole started in both games and played on 57.41% of defensive snaps. He lined up at the nose/one-shade 11.29% of the time, head up on the guard (2 technique) 4.84% of the time, at the 3-tech 74.19% of the time, and on the tackle 9.68% of the time. Over the course of these snaps, he generated 2 solo tackles, 2 assisted tackles, 1 sack, 2 QB pressures, 1 batted pass, 2 run-stuffs and one missed tackle, good for production generated once every 6.89 snaps.
In a coincidence that seems impossible to believe, I also charted Lole's fellow DT transfer Tiaoalii Savea after his commitment to Texas over two games and 62 snaps. Believe it or not, both players generated the exact same per-snap production at once per every 6.89 snaps.
CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
Crazy -- although the way that Savea wins is different than the way Lole wins. Savea, on his 62 snaps versus Washington and Oklahoma in 2023, generated 2 solo tackles, 1 assisted tackle, 2 QB pressures, 1 TFL and 4 run-stuffs. Savea, a fireplug at 293 pounds was more stout against the run while Lole is more of a whirling dervish who seems more natural getting upfield pressure using swats, chops and swim-moves than he is anchoring down and taking on double-teams against zone-runs, even despite being listed at 17 pounds heavier than Savea.
On today's Old Fashioned Show, Anwar put on some highlights of Lole that I gave some spur-of-the-moment commentary on that could help illustrate these points of difference a little farther. The clip below should skip directly to that section, and it is only 3 or 4 minutes long:
Steve Sarkisian has recently said that you can't just replace Murphy and Sweat with two dudes. But, you can hope to at least get some significant portion of their shared production by integrating in a number of new guys whose skill sets can be mixed and matched based on game situation. While Lole and Savea were (very weirdly) equally as productive from an efficiency standpoint over the snaps studied, they are clearly different players. And in this case, diverse skill sets add greatly to the overall vision of this year's somewhat tricky defensive line overhaul.
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