Redshirt Freshman Carl'veon Young Makes the Switch to Defensive End
STILLWATER – The sounds of football and music rang out from the Sherman E. Smith Training Center on Wednesday morning as Oklahoma State officially began Fall Camp.
Eric Morris met with the media following the practice to discuss how the first day went. While there were plenty of good things to talk about, one of the things he was asked about was redshirt freshman linebacker Carl’veon Young’s switch to defensive end.
“I thought he was somebody that could be a little bit better for us to use that skillset if he got a little closer to the line of scrimmage. We saw that a little bit when he was blitzing as a linebacker. As a young kid it’ll take some of the thinking out of the game and allow him to just read and react and play fast.”
Young played sparingly as a true freshman last season, recording one tackle across three games, Kansas, Kansas State and UCF. He’s roughly the same height as he was last season, but he’s put on roughly 30 pounds as he was listed at 215 pounds last season and is now close to 240 pounds.
One of the main issues for OSU going into the fall is depth on the defensive line. Getting Iman Oates back helps, which Morris addressed as well.
"Incredible. He's somebody that I'd be sitting in my office, and he'd be outside running by himself. He'd have to go lift somewhere else and not being able to do his workouts here. Actually, when we were able to get him back, phenomenal shape. Strength was incredible. Maybe the best shape that I've seen here, so a testament to him being committed. That's hard to do when you're out here without the team and don't know what your future looks like. First day back, having him break the guys down at the end, the whole team went crazy."
Linebacker might be one of the deeper groups in the West End Zone.
“I think linebacker and just the way that we roll those guys in there. We’ve got to feel really good about four guys playing there. Obviously, we’ve got [Ethan] Wesloski who’s played a ton of football and knows this scheme. We feel really confident in him. And then [Isaiah] Chisom and Tate [Romney] and Dallas [Winner-Johnson] and all those guys behind them we’ve got to figure out who are our top four that are going to play for us there.”
Dropping Carl’veon down to the line gives the defensive line a lot of explosiveness and athleticism off the edge, something we saw him do at Carl Albert as a senior.
