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Minnesota DT Trill Carter has entered the transfer portal he'll be visiting Texas this week. What can we make of the visit, what it means for how the staff views the current interior DL composition of the team, and what Carter, himself, could possibly bring to the table?
I watched/charted two games from the 2022 season to look for answers:
Illinois 2022
- Clearly big, Carter stuffed Illinois RB Chase Brown early in the game by penetrating upfield on the play-side of an offensive counter concept, but ended up missing the tackle for the TFL. At least he disrupted the play.
- Space-eater for sure.
- Much better penetrating upfield and attacking than working laterally versus outside-zone, feet get tangled up, balance gets lost along with play-side leverage. He can be a loafer once he views himself as being out of the play.
- Generally slow reaction time upfield post-snap -- really shows up over and over.
- Momentum player - if he gets his first step and leverage right to start, he's hard to deal with; if he stands up out of his stance and gets into a stalemate, he loses steam quickly.
- When he gets his pad level down, he is, obviously, much harder to take on even via double teams. Proven ability to split through those guys with proper technique - a promising sign.
- Decently active/heavy hands in pass-rush; could have been called a few times for illegal hands to the face, but in general a sign of decent motor.
- In all, played a terribly unproductive game versus Illinois, tallying 1/2 TFL, 2 run stuffs and one missed tackle on 64 of 84 defensive snaps played.
Michigan State 2022
- This game starts out with Carter looking about the same as expected after the first one; somewhat slow off the line, sometimes getting close to being involved in plays, but not having a giant impact -- you'll also notice right at the start in the first series, there is a ball he could have at least attempted to bat down that he just didn't go up and extend for. It's the kind of effort you get out of T'Vondre Sweat who was opportunistic with that stuff last year, and it adds up when players don't loaf.
- More trouble with getting washed away laterally versus outside zone.
- He's just not an odd-front player, which of course is fine for a potential fit at Texas -- you want him coming upfield on a guard's outside eye and pinning his ears back and just attacking a gap. The problem is, his get-off is inconsistent even when you put him in that situation. He takes up a lot of space in the middle, and that is good, but he doesn't stuff runs unless things fall perfectly for him. It's like Battleship football sometimes -- you wonder if he just goes to a spot like he's calling out a number in a game of battleship and hopes that's where the runner ends up. Long way of saying he doesn't seem to process where the play is going and then redirect with a lot of intention and urgency.
- Can take on pulling guards in the run game and set the edge on counters -- we've seen that twice through 1.5 games so far.
- Saw the first bit of internal pressure through our study of him so far at around 1:36 in the video embedded above. We'll credit it as a pressure, and it was a beneficial one as the QB threw a pick on the play. On the less-bright side, it took 99 snaps until Carter had any semblance of an effect on the passer during this study.
- Side note: I tried to tell anyone who would listen that MSU RB Jarek Broussard would be a good college player before he ever had his first scholarship offer. I remember even the recruiting assistant at U of H telling me he wasn't sure about my eval. Looking back, it wasn't a perfect evaluation considering I had him pegged as a deep threat WR and he ended up a college tailback, but who's counting?
UH should have offered him. Broussard would have been good on that 2022 Houston offense with Clayton Tune and Tank Dell, although, the regime that would have hypothetically recruited him would have been long gone by now.- Back to Trill Carter ...
After watching two games (which was not as many as I figured I would have to watch to get an adequate, near-100-sample of snaps) we can say the following about Carter via the charting numbers:
- You can't argue with the fact that the guy really does play a lot of snaps, over the course of these two games, he played 95 total snaps of 131 charted, good for a snap rate of 72.52%. No Texas interior defensive lineman came close to that frequency of snaps in 2022. The closest competition on the Texas roster would have been T'Vondre Sweat, who played just over 46% of snaps last year.
- Trill Carter was seen by the Minnesota staff as a 3-technique defensive tackle, likely, as we've mentioned, due to the fact that he's not good when having to face an offensive lineman head-up and two-gap (meaning, having to take responsibility for the gaps on either side of the offensive lineman, both inside and out). In these situations, he gets driven off the ball. On the whole, Carter played 77.89% of snaps in the sample at the 3-technique, 9.47% at the 1-technique, 6.32% at the 2-technique (head up on the guard), 5.26% at the 4-technique (head up on the tackle) and 1.05% outside of the tackle entirely.
- The overall worst three parts about his game as noticed through this 95 snap sample are his slow reaction to the ball being snapped, his tendency to loaf when he feels he's out of the play and most importantly, his lack of lateral agility and intentionality to redirect when engaged with offensive linemen executing their outside-zone/stretch play assignments.
- Carter's production per-snap over this sample is miserable. He generated production only once every 29.23 snaps. For reference, and to put this number in context, there was only ONE (1) player out of 40 who took a snap on defense last season who was less efficient on a per-snap basis playing for the Texas Longhorns: that was CB Jamier Johnson who is no longer with the program after giving up an 83.33% completion percentage when targeted on his 154 snaps from 2022, and getting burned in coverage on a team-high once per every 38.5 snaps.
- We know that Texas is looking to get back some of the interior pass-rush presence that it had with the now-departed Keondre Coburn, and Carter is not going to be that guy. One pressure over 95 snaps was the extent of his plays that affected the QB. Here are the players on the Texas defense who had better snaps/QB disruption efficiency in 2022 than Trill Carter had over the sample of plays studied:
Player -- 2022 snaps -- snaps per act of QB disprutpion (sack, hit, pressure, or batted pass)
| DE Jaray Bledsoe | 6 | 3.00 |
| EDGE/DE J'Mond Tapp | 22 | 11.00 |
| DL Zac Swanson | 14 | 14.00 |
| NT Keondre Coburn | 369 | 15.70 |
| DT T'Vondre Sweat | 408 | 18.13 |
| EDGE Ethan Burke | 39 | 19.50 |
| DE Justice Finkley | 136 | 24.73 |
| DE Barryn Sorrell | 549 | 24.95 |
| NT Byron Murphy | 327 | 25.15 |
| DL Moro Ojomo | 316 | 26.33 |
| LB David Gbenda | 59 | 29.50 |
| S/LB Morice Blackwell | 60 | 30.00 |
| DL Vernon Broughton | 210 | 30.00 |
| DL Alfred Collins | 222 | 31.71 |
| LB Demarvion Overshown | 653 | 33.49 |
| DB Jaylon Guilbeau | 205 | 34.17 |
| EDGE Prince Dorbah | 71 | 35.50 |
| EDGE Ovie Oghuofo | 657 | 38.65 |
| LB Devin Richardson | 98 | 49.00 |
| LB Diamonte Tucker-Dorsey | 260 | 52.00 |
| LB Jaylan Ford | 695 | 77.22 |
- When looking at that list, you can see why the staff is a little nervous to have lost an interior lynchpin of the upfield pass-rush in Coburn, but even the guys they HAVE to be a little worried about like Collins and Broughton were three times more efficient and productive in this capacity last season than Carter was over the sample studied. This is not to mention Aaron Bryant, who has taken what looks to be a big step from 2022 to spring of 2023, having seemingly solidified himself as the second nose tackle behind Byron Murphy, but also in freshman Sydir Mitchell, who looks like he’ll have at least a shot to get involved earlier than expected and brings beastly size.
If Texas is worried about bodies on the interior DL and building up depth, that is one thing. Coaches worry, they never want to be left holding the bag when the attrition of the season takes away some of their preferred options and plans. It's only natural to want to replace your least productive guys, cull the herd and bring in players you think could outproduce them, or at least bring more depth to a set of existing depth that you aren't entirely sure about.
But, if Trill Carter was a Longhorn last year and played like he did at Minnesota ... he'd be the top guy the staff would be worried about moving into 2023.
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