Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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mainstay the past two seasons. He will enter his senior campaign in 2014 on the heels of recording 15 tackles last season (two for loss). • Deeb was redshirted as a 2013 freshman. • Moore has never started at line- backer in his first four seasons, but he was invited back for a fifth season to vie for a starting role at the Will spot vacated by graduated fifth-year senior Carlo Calabrese. A NEW ERA For much of the four seasons from 2010-13, the two inside linebacker po- sitions were monopolized by three figures signed in former head coach Charlie Weis' final recruiting haul: Manti Te'o, Calabrese and Dan Fox. As a 2012 senior for the 12-1 Irish, Te'o won the most individual national awards in one season by a Notre Dame player and finished his career third on the Irish all-time tackles chart with 437 at the Mike position. Calabrese, who started eight games as a sophomore in 2010, and Fox were a tag-team opposite Te'o in 2011 and 2012, and both were starters as 2013 fifth-year seniors, with Fox's 95 tack- les pacing the team and Calabrese's 91 second. Calabrese finished his career with 237 tackles and Fox with 226. Nevertheless, Calabrese and Fox were the Tommy Rees of Notre Dame's defense: often unappreci- ated college football players who were extremely valuable to Notre Dame because of no proven depth behind them, yet were lightning rods on occasion because they were not considered NFL material nor "SEC caliber." (Never mind that among 14 SEC teams, only Alabama has had a higher-ranked collective scoring de- fense the past two years than Notre Dame.) The 2014 linebacker haul does not feature someone with the dossier of Te'o or 2013 outside linebacker Jaylon Smith, five-star recruits who became freshman starters. However, in the 6-2, 223-pound Morgan, the Irish have a likely can- didate for immediate playing time. Recruiting analyst Kipp Adams from 247Sports wrote that Morgan "might be more capable on third downs than any [high school] inside linebacker in the country because of his ability to blitz, cover ground in pursuit and ap- ply underneath zone coverage," Whether Morgan's playing time will be situational or more extensive as the season progresses is unknown. After then-new head coach Kelly re- viewed the tape of the freshman Te'o from 2009, he noted that the star pros- pect spent the majority of the year "guessing" on a defense that strug- gled tremendously. Perhaps the main asset Morgan has going for him is he is a "student of the game," accord- ing to Kelly, who personally started recruiting the Chicago-area product after he didn't have the Irish among his top six choices at one point. "We've got to do a good job as coaches of getting the 11 best play- ers on the field," said Kelly when speaking of Morgan and the defense. "Sometimes we're a little hesitant of getting the 11 best players on the field for certain reasons. … There's still some competition there that he's got