Can Romeo Okwara Challenge Justin Tuck’s Record?

Notre Dame has been able to withstand a myriad of injuries in 2015 because of the depth the Irish have built up over the last few years on the recruiting trail.  That hasn’t always been the case though such as four years ago when a 17 year old true freshman was thrust into action for the 2012 Fighting Irish.  Four years later, Romeo Okwara still can’t walk into a bar and order a beer as a 20 year old senior, but he has started to terrorize opposing quarterbacks.

A year ago Romeo Okwara led Notre Dame in sacks with just four – a paltry number for a team leader in sacks.  This year, Okwara is again the team leader, but that total has skyrocketed to nine with at least three games remaining in the season.  Most impressively, eight of those sacks have come in the last five games as the North Carolina native is just starting to tap into his vast potential.  Luckily for Notre Dame that production is coming at a time when they are in desperate need of a pass rusher.

On Senior Day last weekend, Okwara had the best game of his collegiate career racking up three sacks against Wake Forest including the one that came as a result of leaping over a would be blocker.  It was the kind of performance Brian Kelly and his staff envisioned when they recruited the raw edge rusher four years ago.

His recent torrid pace has Okwara climbing up the NCAA leaderboard and the Notre Dame single season sack record list.  Sitting at 9.0 sacks on the season, Okwara breached the top 10 and is tied for 9th nationally.   With three, maybe four, games remaining, Okwara has an outside chance of challenging Justin Tuck’s single season Notre Dame sack record of 13.5 and will almost certainly hit double digits before the end of the season.  That kind of production could pique the curiosity of a NFL team next May in the Draft.

With a couple of run oriented teams on tap the next two weeks, it might look like it could be hard to Okwara to have enough opportunities to really make a push for Tuck’s record, but on the other hand the last time Notre Dame traveled to Boston to face the Eagles, Prince Shembo registered one of his sack outburst games with three sacks. Okwara needs 4.5 sacks over the next 3-4 games to tie Tuck.  He has 6.0 sacks alone in the last three weeks.

Okwara’s path to becoming Notre Dame’s go to pass rusher, however, hasn’t been easy.  He bounced around between outside linebacker and defense end while playing in two different defensive systems under Bob Diaco and Brian Vangorder over the last four seasons.  Okwara has also struggled to keep his weight up in past seasons which lead to him wearing down.

Much like Harrison Smith back in 2010, Okwara is playing his absolute best football as he nears the end of his final collegiate season.  If you recall, Smith was the poster child for board bashing across all of the Notre Dame websites during his first three seasons as he bounced around between safety and outside linebacker before Brian Kelly came in and emphatically said Smith couldn’t play for Notre Dame anywhere but safety.

During Smith’s true senior campaign, he registered a team high 7 interceptions including three picks in Notre Dame’s win over USC to end the season and propel the Irish to a bowl game.  Unlike Smith though, Okwara doesn’t have the luxury of a 5th season thanks to the extensive action he was forced into in 2012.  Harrison Smith used the momentum from his banner senior season to carry over into his 5th year with Notre Dame was was eventually a 1st round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings capping off quite the career turnaround.

Okwara won’t have that same luxury, but that doesn’t mean that his recent surge and climb up the Notre Dame record books won’t result in the youngster being selected highly in next May’s draft.  Two years ago the Philadelphia Eagles reached in the first round on a young defensive end/outside linebacker from Louisville who had 14.5 sacks as a senior named Marcus Smith.  Smith was seen as a raw player with upside as a pass rusher, but as he enters his second season, he has just one career tackle.

Okwara’s trajectory is similar to Smith’s so it’s not impossible that one team could look at Okwara’s age and production and realize that he is just starting to tap his potential.  The problem with that is, very few teams have the luxury these days of drafting a player too highly that will need more time to develop and the slowed development of Marcus Smith at the NFL level could cause some teams to drop Okwara on their draft boards.

Now, just imagine if Okwara had a 5th year available to him.  He’d be entering his third year in the same defense and would likely be one of the premier pass rushers in the country heading into the 2016 season.  Unfortunately, Notre Dame didn’t have the same kind of depth in 2012 that they do in 2015.  the kind of depth that has allowed the staff to keep the redshirts on players like Asmar Bilal, Josh Barajas, Mykelti Williams, and the trio of freshman defensive linemen.

While Okwara won’t have the opportunity to come back for a 5th year and not only terrorize opposing quarterbacks but also improve his own draft stock, we are all luckily starting to see him play at an extremely high level and provide the pass rush this defense has been sorely missing.

If he can keep playing at the level he is playing, he will still play himself into a much higher draft selection than he was projected at before the season and the Notre Dame defense just may start to resemble the defense we all hoped to see this year.  If he keeps playing at this pace he could also leave Notre Dame with more sacks in a single season than any Notre Dame player.