Nyles Morgan Starting To Heat Up On Notre Dame's Defense

As the dog days of August and college football training camp start to fatigue the body and overwhelm the mind, junior Mike linebacker Nyles Morgan is just now getting warmed up.

“His last two practices have been his best two practices in training camp,” noted Notre Dame third-year defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder during Wednesday’s media day. “He’s on it.”

Coming from VanGorder, who has been relentlessly instructing the thick-skinned Morgan with “hard coaching” the past three years while shaping him to become the quarterback of his defense, it speaks well about Morgan hitting his stride instead of the wall at the end of week two of preseason drills.

Named a Freshman All-American in 2014 when he had to replace the injured Joe Schmidt the final five games, Morgan acknowledged that he was comparable to someone who went from basic arithmetic to Calculus, and it showed during a four-game losing streak when the Irish yielded nearly 44.5 points per game — though, in fairness, it included a couple of interceptions for scores by the opposition.

“The thing is you have to know your job, and you have to know everyone else’s job as well,” said Morgan on Wednesday “He runs an NFL system. We have base, nickel, sub, speed … and you have to know what to do in all those scenarios. We just started goal line [defense] today.

“Back then everything is kind of like a whirlwind. You’re trying to get to here, get to there, make sure you’re doing this right — but you kind of didn’t understand why. Year 3, I kind of get the whys in a lot of things. I can piece together things a lot quicker … but it does take a lot of time, lot of effort, especially at Mike linebacker.”

As a sophomore, with Schmidt back for his fifth season of eligibility, Morgan took only 41 snaps on defense, 28 of them in the 62-27 blowout of UMass. He will only refer to it as "a coaching decision," and leave it at that.

“It’s kind of like you feed a pit bull steak one day, and the next day he’s expecting it again, and it never came,” Morgan said. “So obviously, he’s hungry. … That hunger is really what is pushing this team to be great.”

Despite the loss of six defensive starters, most conspicuously Butkus Award winner Jaylon Smith, Morgan believes collective improvement should be forthcoming on that side of the ball for two reasons.

First, the senior and junior classes have now assimilated into VanGorder’s system for three seasons, and juniors such as linemen Jay Hayes, Andrew Trumbetti and Jonathan Bonner, linebackers Morgan and Greer Martini, safety Drue Tranquill and cornerback Nick Watkins (out for about a month with an arm injury) are eager to display the product of that growth.

“This is really like VanGorder’s first freshman class,” said Morgan of his fellow juniors. “Since we’re in year 3, we have guys just like me, Jay Hayes, Shaun Crawford [sidelined last year as a freshman with a knee injury], a lot of guys are hungry … a bitter attitude and intensity as far as aggressiveness, getting to the ball — and we know what we’re doing [now].”

Second, the upperclassmen are far more in tune with the defense than when he enrolled two years ago, and Morgan believes the trickle-down effect is taking better hold with the freshmen.

“Because we know what we’re doing, we can tell them what the coaches are trying to say,” said Morgan of possibly a half-dozen freshmen expected to contribute on defense this year. “Coach VanGorder, when I came in it was like he’s speaking Mandarin, I don’t know what he’s saying. We were all kind of learning together, versus now when I know what he’s saying … because I was in your shoes, I can tell you how it’s done. A lot of these young guys should catch on pretty quickly.

“It feels like a lot more bodies are in there, a lot more guys playing fast, quicker.”

Having added 25 pounds since enrolling, the 245-pound Morgan looks the part, but more importantly he is confident that he knows the part.

“He just keeps getting better,” said VanGorder, whose respect for the Rivals’ Top 100 recruit’s mental and physical toughness has continued to expand with each passing day. “It was very difficult for Nyles. A lot of football thrown at him, he wasn’t ready for that.

“He was forced to play and when you’re forced to play and not ready and you’ve got to manage a whole system, you see this with young quarterbacks a lot of times: They get thrown in when they’re young and not ready and then all of a sudden there’s this perception of them. It can not only run through the public, it can run through a team.

“His ability to persevere, he’s mentally tough. Part of his mental toughness and commitment to the game is to realize where he was, where he is and where he can go.”

And similar to a quarterback, VanGorder said now that Morgan knows what he’s doing, his job description since the spring has been to bring his defensive teammates up with him.

“You have to take charge and it’s yours,” VanGorder told Morgan. “A lot of guys are depending on your communication and how you call it. He continues to tighten the grip on that. He’s got a lot of work as a player, a lot of football left out in front of him, but he’s got all the right things relative to being obsessed with the game and getting better and tough.

“He’s done an admirable job relative to managing it all, but I’ve got to see him as a starter — let’s see what you can do, Nyles. Let’s see what it looks like for 70 plays in a big game. He’s on the right road right now, he’s worked hard.”

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