Scouting Combine Edge Rushers: Thrill of the Chase

Part 4 of our four-part series is highlighted by Ohio State’s Chase Young and includes prolific Kenny Willekes of Michigan State, Curtis Weaver of Boise State, Josh Uche of Michigan and Derrek Tuszka of North Dakota State.

Author:
Bill Huber
Publish date:
Feb 21, 2020 10:17 AM EST

In all, 34 edge defenders will be at the Scouting Combine. Some will work out with the defensive ends and some will work out with the linebackers. Part 4 of our four-part series is highlighted by Ohio State’s Chase Young and includes prolific Kenny Willekes of Michigan State, Curtis Weaver of Boise State, Josh Uche of Michigan and Derrek Tuszka of North Dakota State. (Underclassmen are noted with an asterisk.)

LB Casey Toohill, Stanford (6-4, 247): Toohill had a banner final year. On the field, he was second-team all-conference with career highs of eight sacks and 11.5 tackles for losses among his 60 tackles. Off the field, he was one of 12 finalists for the William V. Campbell Trophy – aka the Academic Heisman. He was a three-time member of the Pac-12 academic team. In four seasons, he tallied 14 sacks and 21.5 TFLs.

Toohill knows the risks involved in playing football but he won’t be stopped. “Those concerns are very valid, but there is so much to be learned from the game and the team aspect of the game,” Toohill told Tucson.com. “Resilience, teamwork, response to adversity — there’s no other sport that teaches it better. Football has taught me a lot.” Among his internships was one in the office of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He had a 3.71 GPA with a degree in political science.

DE Derrek Tuszka, North Dakota State (6-5, 246): Tuszka was a first-team FCS All-American and one of five finalists for the Buck Buchanan Award, which goes to the top defender in the FCS ranks. The Missouri Valley Defensive Player of the Year had 13.5 sacks and 19 tackles for losses as a senior in helping the Bison win the national championship. In school history, he’s fifth with 29.5 sacks and sixth with 42 TFLs. In 14 career playoff games, he piled up 10.5 sacks.

As a senior at Warner (S.D.) High School, he rushed for 1,460 yards and had 109 tackles in nine-man football. He was a five-year starter in basketball and five-year state track qualifier in the 100 and 200 meters and shot put. Warner High School has an enrollment of 96 students. “I’m taking this as another challenge,” he told InForum.com. “I’m used to it by now.” A brother, Jarrod, played defensive end for NDSU from 2013 through 2017. He earned his pilot license during his second year in college and owns a plane. As a kid, he loved to watch the plane spray the family’s farm fields. “I thought that was the coolest job in the world and I wanted to do that,” Tuszka told the Bismarck Tribune. After football, he wants to move to Alaska.

LB Josh Uche, Michigan (6-2, 250): All nine of Uche’s starts came as a senior, when he was second-team all-Big Ten with team highs of 8.5 sacks and 11.5 tackles for losses. Off the bench as a junior, he had seven sacks.

As he told the school athletics site: “I was just so motivated this year to prove I could drop into coverage, prove that I could lead the team in sacks again, and that it wasn't just a fluke, that I could play traditional linebacker, that I could be in the box. I'm not pigeon-holed into being just a pass rusher. I can do anything you want. I can do it, and can get it done.” Uche’s parents are from Nigeria and are all about education. As a sophomore in high school in Miami, his dad wouldn’t let him play. “He believes in school, education more than anything. He didn’t even really want me playing football,” Uche told the Free Press. “At the first high school I was at, my siblings were getting these little flyers in the mail, ‘Hey, come to our college,’ or whatever, and I wasn’t getting them and I was playing football at the time. He was mad and he thought I wasn’t focusing on school, so he pulled me out of football. I was out for a year or something like that.” After the 2017 season, he went to defensive coordinator Don Brown and asked for more playing time. The conversation got heated. “Well go earn it, how about that? How about go earn it?” Brown related in a story for USA Today.

LB Curtis Weaver, Boise State*: (6-3, 265): Weaver didn’t just set the Mountain West Conference’s career sacks record but he obliterated. He finished with a school-record 34 sacks, blowing past the previous record of 28.5 shared by BYU's Jan Jorgensen (2006-09) and TCU's Jerry Hughes (2006-09). He was a first-team All-American and the Mountain West’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2019 with 13.5 sacks and 18.5 tackles for losses. He had 9.5 sacks as a sophomore and 11 as a freshman.

While his play is no laughing matter, the rest of life is a barrel of laughs. “When I was young I was always a family guy and every time we had game night I wanted to be the center of attention you could say,” Weaver told the Idaho Press. When it’s time to get serious, Weaver turns on the game face. “He’s just so fun to be around, and so fun-loving and light hearted,” co-defensive coordinator Spencer Danielson told the school newspaper. “I’ve also never met a guy that can flip the switch like him. He could be the guy that’s playing Candy Crush on his phone an hour before game and then when it’s time to go, it’s time to go. He’ll flip the switch and he’ll be so dialed in on this assignment. And he’ll have this attack mind-set. It’s not calm.” He was fueled by the death of his grandmother in 2008. “He said, ‘From this day forward, I’m going to take care of the family, I’m going to be the best player in the NFL,’” his mom told the Athletic. “When we’d go to the cemetery, he’d say the same thing, put his arm around me and just say, ‘I promise I’ll take care of you.’ ”

DE Kenny Willekes, Michigan State (6-4, 260): Willekes won the Burlsworth Trophy, which goes to the nation’s best player who started his career as a walk-on. In 2018, he was the Big Ten’s Defensive Lineman of the Year, a first-team All-American and team MVP with 8.5 sacks, 20.5 tackles for losses and 78 total tackles. In 2019, he was first-team all-Big Ten and MVP again with 10.5 sacks, 16 TFLs, two forced fumbles and 78 tackles. Essentially, all 26 sacks, 51 TFLs and five forced fumbles came during his final three seasons.

Despite a superb prep career, Willekes didn’t even receive a scholarship offer from the Mid-American Conference. His best offers belonged in Division II. His path to stardom wasn’t immediately obvious. “No disrespect to him,” quarterback Brian Lewerke said late in 2018. “But when I came in, I saw him, I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ He played fullback, he played middle linebacker, I think he played tight end on scout team for a little bit. Coming in, I was like, ‘I just don’t see this guy being able to play.’” Before a bowl game against Alabama, he served as the stand-in to Heisman Trophy-winning running back Derrick Henry. "I didn't know when it was going to happen or how it was going to happen, But I was going to do whatever I had to do to make it,” he told ESPN. A tireless work ethic, however, made it happen. “He can be one of those walk-on stories that you see making plays because he goes 110 percent each rep,” linebacker Andrew Dowell said in 2017. “You tell him to run through a brick wall, he'll find a way to get through that brick wall.” His monster 2018 season ended with a broken leg in the Redbox Bowl. That put an end to his thoughts of jumping to the NFL. “It just kind of taught me that I thought I had my whole life planned out, I thought I was gonna go to the NFL and do what I wanted,” Willekes told the Free Press. “The Lord just kind of said, ‘You don’t have control of your life. This is what I want you to do.’ "

DE D.J. Wonnum, South Carolina (6-5, 260): Wonnum was second-team all-SEC and a team captain as a senior, when he was named Comeback Player of the Year. After being limited to five games in 2018 by an ankle injury, Wonnum had 4.5 sacks and 9.5 tackles for losses among his 30 stops. He also was a team captain in 2017, when he posted six sacks, 13 TFLs and all five career passes defensed to highlight a four-year career of 14 sacks and 29.5 TFLs.

Wonnum had only five offers from Power 5 schools. One of those was not his home-state school, Georgia. “It’s a big game because some of us weren’t offered by Georgia so we have to show them why we play in the SEC,” Wonnum told the Charlotte Observer before a game against the Bulldogs. “Oh yeah, I’m coming in ready to play.” A younger brother, Dylan, plays offensive tackle for the Gamecocks. Like many brothers, they liked to roughhouse. One time, they put a hole in the wall. “We were playing (and) I fell in the wall,” Dylan told the Athletic. “We broke a lot of stuff growing up. We were brothers, you know: close — fights — close — fights … the boy stuff.” Replied D.J.: “We were that way every day. We got a lot of whuppings growing up.” South Carolina was “no longer welcome” to recruit their younger brother, Tra. He went to the same high school, Stephenson in Stone Mountain, Ga., as Mississippi State’s Chauncey Rivers, another edge rusher who will be at the Combine.

DE Chase Young, Ohio State* (6-5, 265): All Young did was finish No. 1 in the nation with 16.5 sacks, No. 2 with 21.5 tackles for losses and No. 1 with six forced fumbles during a prodigious junior season. And that’s with a two-game suspension for taking a loan. He destroyed Wisconsin with a school-record four sacks in October on his way to breaking the school’s single-season record of 15. “Obviously going into the season you want to play the best. You want to break every record,” Young said after the game. His three-year totals include 31 sacks – second-most in program history – and 42.5 TFLs.

He is one of the more decorated defensive prospects in years. He was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy. Since 1982, he was just the ninth defensive player out of 159 finalists. The headline from the Columbus Dispatch says it all: Chase Young a Heisman finalist despite playing defense, being suspended. He didn’t care to hype his candidacy. “The only thing that would allow me to go to the Heisman is my play,” he said. “I feel like, if I talk about it, then it wouldn’t really mean too much. Because it’s based off what I did on the field. So if I go out and have a good game, it’ll help. But if I go out and don’t have a good game, all the talking I did really didn’t say anything because I didn’t do it on the field. I feel it’s just not about talking; it’s all about ball.” He won the Bednarik Award and the Bronko Nagurski Trophy, which recognize the nation’s outstanding defensive player, and the Ted Hendricks Award, which goes to the nation’s top defensive end. A unanimous All-American, he also won the Chicago Tribune Silver Football as the Big Ten’s best player and the Big Ten’s Defensive Player and Defensive Lineman of the Year awards.

Young had 10.5 sacks as a sophomore. “Chase has some high expectations for himself, and I think that’s cool,” defensive line coach Larry Johnson told the Toledo Blade in 2018. “He’s a guy who really wants to be a great player, and everything he does is based on that. He’s a great learner. I mean, he picks Nick (Bosa’s) brain every day about how to rush the passer, things he can learn. That’s what you want from a player that’s a high competitor guy and wants to be a great player.”

The face of Young’s beloved grandfather is tattooed on his right arm. “So basically this is a lion, right?” he told the Washington Post. “And if you look at his eyes, he’s looking up. So I look at myself as a lion. So he’s looking up, and he’s looking up at my grandfather. And these are the stairs to heaven, and God welcoming him, you know, his hand out. And I’m looking at my grandfather going up into heaven.” Flag football wasn’t his thing. Neither was basketball. “In basketball, they talk trash,” Young told the Columbus Dispatch, “‘I’m going to cross you over, I’m going to do a move and shake you and pull up in your face.’ It wasn’t too convincing. If you want to talk trash in football, I’m just going to hit you the next play. You take it out even more. That was the mindset I had when I was young.” He went to the same high school as NBA player Markelle Fultz, the No. 1 overall pick in 2017 by the 76ers. “We told each other in high school. I said I was going to be the No. 1 pick,” Fultz told the Athletic, “and (Chase) told me he was going to be the top pick.”

DE Jabari Zuniga, Florida (6-4, 246): Zuniga had three sacks and seven tackles for losses in five games in 2019, his final campaign ruined by a high-ankle sprain. With five sacks and 8.5 TFLs as a freshman and 6.5 sacks and 11 TFLs as a sophomore, he posted career totals of 18.5 sacks and 34.5 TFLs in 42 games.

At Sprayberry High School in Marietta, Ga., the imposing Zuniga was a basketball player until trying football for the first time as a junior. "When I first got out there, I didn't really like it,'' Zuniga told the school athletics site. “Then I hit somebody, and I just loved that feeling. I was eager to learn.” To reach his potential, he had to run off some “baby fat.” As his mom said in the aforementioned story: "There were plenty of days when he was like, 'Mom, it's hard for me.' I can remember him getting up in the morning and saying, 'Mom, they have me running and I felt like I was going to die out there.' He just couldn't handle it. Running was never a big thing of his. That first year was really hard for him. But Jabari is really not a complainer like that.” The remade body was obvious. "I have a rule," UF defensive line coach Chris Rumph told the Orlando Sentinel. "He cannot take his shirt off in front of my wife." Zuniga burst onto the scene as a freshman.