Breakdown - How does Tiaoalii Savea improve the Texas defense?

For as many additions Texas has been able to accumulate in the transfer portal this cycle (S Andrew Mukuba, WR Matthew Golden, EDGE Trey Moore, WR Isaiah Bond, WR Silas Golden, LB Kendrick Blackshire and TE Amari Niblack), the program does still have a need for interior defensive linemen.

We've discussed before how the loss of Byron Murphy and T'Vondre Sweat (while not ideal) is not a program-killer for Texas given the beefening up of other units on the defense, yet still, Texas can't have the interior DL be a liability coming into its first year in the SEC. One player that has emerged as a potential transfer portal target is Tiaoalii Savea from Arizona who played under new co-DC Johnny Nansen last season. (Note: Savea announced his commitment to Texas on Tuesday morning.)

Savea is listed at 6-4 and 305 pounds and he was an effective player for an Arizona defense that improved greatly in 2023 from its 2022 form. Originally committed to UCLA as a pretty high-profile recruit in the Class of 2021 (Rivals 4-star), he transferred to Arizona in 2022 and played sparingly. Even in 2023, he wasn't a starter for the Wildcats. It leaves you wondering if he's a take.

Which brings up another, related question: was Trill Carter last year technically a "take"?

If you were to listen to Pro Football Focus (which I typically don't), you'd find that PFF had Savea "graded" as the team's best interior DL, despite the fact that he was clearly among the team's second platoon in the defensive trenches. Why was he on the second team? I'm really not sure. The first team nose tackle (No. 45) is doughy and can't move but therein may lie the problem -- and a question Texas will have to answer when addressing the line's interior: do we really need more interior DLs in general, or do we need specifically players who profile to possibly play nose tackle?

And here's where we get back to Trill Carter, who will not be returning to Texas after one season as a meager-at-best contributor in the actual production department (as very easily predicted) but was at least a 26% snap-count guy. He played at Texas if nothing else, the only problem was, on those 26% of snaps, he generated a truly awful 17.11 snaps/production caused efficiency metric.

Looking back at the study linked above, we see that in watching back two games of Carter (versus Illinois and Michigan State) in 2022 for Minnesota, he:

- played 95 total snaps

- played 9.47% of snaps at the nose tackle or 1-shade, 6.32% head-up on the guard, 77.89% at the 3-tech, 5.26% head-up on the tackle, and 1.05% at the 5-tech

- in all of those snaps, had one assisted tackle, one pressure, 1/2 TFL, 2 run-stuffs and one missed tackle for a truly pathetic 29.23 snaps/production caused

Let's compare that to Savea, who I watched back two games of yesterday (better teams than Trill Carter faced, in fact, it was the only two teams who beat Texas last year in Oklahoma and Washington). In those two games, Savea:

- played 62 total snaps

- played 4.84% of snaps at the nose tackle or 1-shade, 8.06% head-up on the guard, 69.35% at the 3-tech, 11.29% head-up on the tackle, and 6.45% at the 5-tech

- in all of those snaps, had 2 tackles, one assist, 2 QB pressures, one TFL, 4 run-stuffs and one missed tackle for a very good 6.89 snaps/production caused -- a number that would have been third-best on the Texas DL for last year behind only T'Vondre Sweat (5.44) and Byron Murphy (6.09) and light years ahead of the next man up (Alfred Collins - 11.09)

Now, I'm not saying that I think Savea would come in and be the real, ultimate difference-maker Texas would need to completely round out the unit and take away all worries. He played well in these two games, but he needs to work on his pad level in the run game as well as controlling his body better than he has shown. He can be a really good, violent penetrator, especially when slanting across a guard or tackle's face, but he can become unwieldy and fail to break down properly once he gets in the vicinity of his target to actually make the play.

All this said, if you were happy to land Trill Carter last year, you should be doing cartwheels about the possibility of landing a player like Savea. The nose tackle conundrum still exists, though. Carter did play a good bit of nose tackle last year at Texas, but as you can see above, Savea doesn't profile in exactly the same manner. The farther out you get from the center, the more the longer and more slender Savea would be deployed in comparison to Carter, although 3-tech play dominated the alignment mix for both players.