Agreed, Nunnally and Adler are playing extremely well. Moorhead said he didn’t know Adler’s health status in any of his media sessions, so we may see a lot more of Richards and Dall this week if Adler is limited. Richards has been playing really well in his newfound backup role and is actually the top rated player on defense. That said, he’s played under 80 snaps, so that’s a skewed metric and the reason I didn’t add him above.
The DT rotation is deep and will need to be solid again against WMU. Brockington has been good the past two weeks as he has picked up Murphy’s snaps. Moore has been a nightmare for opposing centers when he is lined up at NT. Moore is a guy who seems to get better every week and we’ll be fortunate to hang on to him for the duration of his career.
Murphy may be hurt. He hasn’t seen any action in the past two weeks after being a top backup the first 4 weeks of the season. The “play 4 games, redshirt, and transfer” ordeal did cross my mind, but he’s already used his redshirt (unless he applies for a medical redshirt), so I don’t think that’s the case.
On a different note, we’ve had an unusual amount of missed tackles this season (the whole defense, not just one position) and I have to believe that was due to the brutal non-conference slate. It really showed up in the 2nd half against Rutgers. Tackling was decent against a talent deprived Colgate squad, and then reared its ugly head the following two weeks against South Carolina and Ohio. I believe injuries really played a part in that because we looked much crisper against a Bowling Green team (who is better in almost every area than Ohio). We’ll definitely need to tackle well this week and I expect we’ll devote an extra player to the box and play a lot of man on the backend. We play a lot of man anyway, but I expect we’ll see it more than usual this game. My guess is we’ll force WMU to prove they can throw the ball on us. I’m not sure they can without a run game.
On the flip side, if WMU can get their run game going, it may be a long afternoon.