Huskies' Well-Worn Defensive Linemen Ease Into Spring Football

No position area for the University of Washington football team with multiple starters returning is more fortified, experienced and, for that matter, battered than the defensive tackles.

Back are Tuli Letuligasenoa and Faatui Tuitele who each opened all 13 games last season except one — when Letuligasenoa came off the bench as a reserve at Arizona State, but only because he was hobbled.

Collectively, these grizzled veterans, one a sixth-year senior from Concord, California, and the other a fifth-year junior from Honolulu, Hawaii, have appeared in 73 Husky outings and started 42.

Yet with all of this steady hand-banging and hand-to-hand combat comes a physical toll.

For the first three spring practices before the quarter break, Letuligasenoa and Tuitele pulled on uniforms but were relegated to non-contact work and forced to watch much of the scripted activity as they recover from offseason and unspecified medical procedures.

"Those guys just had a few things that got cleaned up after the season and we're on the home stretch," UW coach Kalen DeBoer said of his down linemen. "Well, we're close on one and it might be a couple more weeks with the other."

Tuitele missed all of DeBoer's spring football practices a year ago as he rode around on a cart with his left foot in a boot, but was ready when the season began.

Letuligasenoa and Tuitele haven't necessarily been dominant players, though Tuli was selected All-Pac-12 honorable mention in 2021, but they've provided much-needed stability up front to a Husky defense that not too long ago had opposing teams running all over it.

The 6-foot-3, 314-pound Tuitele, a very thick human being who with his helmet off looks a lot older than he is, emerges from a season in which he mostly held his ground. He finished with just 12 tackles, or fewer than one per game, but he recovered a pair of fumbles against Stanford and knocked down a pass against Michigan State.

He has 3.5 career sacks, with 3 of them coming in 2021, a lone bright spot in an injury-filled, porous season for the UW defense.

Letuligasenoa, a much more compact 6-foot-1, 302-pounder, came up with 30 tackles last season and has 2 career sacks, though none last season.

So between them, these two were responsible for just a half sack during the entirety of DeBoer's debut season, which is something they'll want to address for the coming football campaign.

However, where Letuligasenoa really excels, even without the added inches that Tuitele possesses, is he knocked down 4 passes last fall, and has 7 pass break-ups in his career. He's an alert player.

Most of all, these veteran defensive tackles, when healthy, provide a reliable presence up front and ample space-filling rather than outlandish Steve Emtman or Vita Vea shows of strength, which the Huskies find reassuring enough.

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