Eagles defense has holes to fill

Eastern Washington associate head football coach John Graham doesn’t expect to be the only defensive coordinator in the Big Sky Conference spending a few sleepless nights this fall.

With seven of the league’s eight most efficient quarterbacks from 2009 returning this season, he figures there should be plenty of stress to spread around. And he is probably right.

But adding to the depth of Graham’s concern heading into Monday afternoon’s start of fall camp is the dramatic lack of depth in the Eagles’ secondary, where junior strong safety Matt Johnson stands as the only returning starter.

“There’s no question that’s one of our biggest question marks,” Graham admitted. “Essentially, we have only two kids – Matt Johnson and Jesse Hoffman – who have played a lot of football back there, so we need to figure some things out in a hurry.”

Johnson, a 6-foot-1, 205-pounder, started all 12 games for the Eagles last fall, picking off a team-high six passes and getting involved in 101 tackles. Hoffman, a senior, started two games, picked off a pass and made 32 tackles, and Dante Calcote, another senior, started three games and finished the year with 31 tackles.

But the rest of the young men hoping to step into one of the three secondary spots left vacant by the graduation losses of Kevin Hatch, Lonnie Hosley and Brent Igbinoba, combined to make only 20 tackles and one interception.

Johnson is lock to start at strong safety, and Hoffman and Calcote head into fall camp as the projected starters at the corners.

“Jesse and Dante are two seniors who have been in our program a long time,” he explained. “And they still seem to get better and better with every practice and every game, so they should be more than adequate this year, I think.

“But the battle for the free safety position is wide open.”

One of the top candidates to replace Hatch is sophomore Erich Armstrong, who played baseball at Washington State as a freshman in the fall of 2009, but transferred to EWU later that same school year and was a non-lettering squad member on last year’s team, which finished 8-4 after losing to Stephen F. Austin in the first round of the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision playoffs.

“Eric is a kid we recruited out of high school a couple of years ago,” Graham said. “He started to make some progress last fall, and had a good spring. He’s one of several kids who we feel have the athletic ability to contribute this year.”

Among those expected to push Armstrong for the starting free safety spot are oft-injured senior and three-year letterwinner Will Edge, junior John Roberts, a two-year letterwinner from Colville, and sophomore Jeff Minnerly, a converted quarterback out of Lewis & Clark High School.

“And then we’ve got a lot of young kids battling at those other spots, too,” Graham said. “We feel good about their athletic ability. They just haven’t played enough football, yet.”

As a means of dealing with that problem, Graham plans to give several of his younger defensive backs meaningful minutes in the Eagles’ first two nonconference games against Nevada (Sept. 2) and Central Washington (Sept. 11) in an attempt to define their secondary roles prior to Eastern’s Big Sky and home opener against Montana on Sept. 18.

“It’s nice to have those two non-conference games before we get into the Big Sky and start having to deal with all of those quality quarterbacks in our league,” Graham said. “With as many (inexperienced) kids as we have, we need to get them some playing time early and gets things sorted out so we feel really good when Sept. 18 rolls around.”