6 days ago
Did Notre Dame football tease its starting defensive during Sunday's scrimmage?
As every college football program has to deal with turnover each season, Notre Dame football may have given everyone a preview of who will start on defense when the team opens play on the road against Miami.
A full-team scrimmage took place on Sunday and The Athletic's Pete Sampson shared who was out with the first-team defense. Starting with the defensive line, it was Joshua Burnham, Jason Onye, Donovan Hinish, and Boubacar Traore. It's all new full-time starters here, but many of them have play an extensive amount in their careers.
Another promising aspect of this group is that it looks like Traore has fully recovered from his ACL injury suffered last fall. The second-team consisted of Junior Tuihalamaka, Gabriel Rubio, Bryce Young and Jared Dawson. Expect all four of these linemen to get plenty of run this fall even though they aren't considered starters right now.
The linebackers were Drayk Bowen, and Jaylen Sneed, which shouldn't come as a surprise. Bowen was the starter last fall, and Sneed has been coming on during camp and looks to have taken an early lead over Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa and Jaiden Ausberry. With a two-linebacker rotation, you're going to see plenty of these top four during the season.
As for the secondary, the first-team was Leonard Moore, Christian Gray, DeVonta Smith, Luke Talich and Adon Shuler. This group looks like one of the best in the country, and it was a bit surprising that Smith and Talich were with the 1's. The second-team was Dallas Golden, Mark Zackery, Jalen Stroman, Tae Johnson and Carson Hobbs. This group could start at many other top programs.
The depth is impressive along the defense, as it is expected that there shouldn't be much drop off with a change at defensive coordinator from Al Golden to Chris Ash.
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