im excited that some of these highly touted guys will be forced into playing…sometime, thats gives a player more focus and will in return give us more production.

…should all see a lot of playing time. Fanney was solid, but all three of those guys are just plain scary. We’ve also got a couple of guys name Nico and Tana who don’t necessarily have to redshirt this year.

Just looking at his physical build you would think he’d be a great fit at linebacker, at he’s at least a pretty decent athlete, but apparently he has really struggled since stepping on campus. He never even came close to legitimately challenging Keith Saunders or Brandon Fanney for any playing time (despite the fact that neither of those two guys ever played very well), likewise for Eryk Anders, and Courtney Upshaw moved by him on the depth chart in just a few days.

He’s only going to be a redshirt sophomore this year, but even so it really does not look good for his future. For what it’s worth, and it might not be much, his name is one of the ones that commonly gets thrown around in the potential attrition talk.

I say that for two major reasons:

First, the entire idea behind having a Jack linebacker in the first place is to create a position for a kid who can consistently rush the passer off the edge. For a Jack linebacker, pass rushing production is effectively why the position itself exists. And to that end, Fanny was a non-factor last year. He had one sack and only six quarterback hurries, but even that is a bit misleading because his "one" sack was actually two half sacks in which he kind of jumped in late. Eryk Anders was the one who did the damage with the Georgia sack, and it was Deaderick really doing the work on the sack in the Florida game. Either way, the point remains that the underlying reason for even having the Jack position is to rush the quarterback, and Fanney was a complete non-factor with that last year.

Second, you are right that Fanney was a pretty good player against the run, but even there I do have some issues. If you look closer at his statistical breakdown, nearly two-thirds of his tackles were assisted. My gut instinct after watching games was that he was often a bit of a pile jumper who was commonly the beneficiary of the entire front seven collapsing plays, and the statistics seemingly bear that out. As a whole he was third on the team in tackles, but he only had 26 solo tackles on the year, and that was good for only 8th on the team. Furthermore, only three times in fourteen games did he have more than two solo tackles in a game, and two of those times came against Tulane and Arkansas State.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not trying to needlessly criticize Fanney, but by the same token I have a hard time seeing where he played particularly well last year. He was a non-factor in the passing game, and while his raw tackle numbers make him out to be a bit of a force in the running game, there are plenty of reasons to think those numbers were largely the result not of his own performance, but the result of playing on a defensive front seven that was very good against the run.