Sixth-year linebacker Read Sunn warms up at Eastern Washington after scant playing time with Wyoming

It is entirely accurate to say that at the core of Eastern Washington’s defensive resurgence is a nucleus of freshmen and sophomores who, transfer portal pending, could remain at their spots for a couple more seasons.

But it would be misleading to stop there and to say nothing of at least a handful of upperclassmen who are also contributing.

And that conversation absolutely must include Read Sunn.

“He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever met,” redshirt junior defensive end Ben Voigtlaender said of Sunn. “You can tell he’s passionate in the way he plays. He’s a huge value added for our defense and our team.”

In his first year with Eastern – but his sixth year playing college football – the linebacker Sunn leads the Eagles with 59 tackles, including a team-high six for loss, with two sacks and a pass breakup to boot.

Two weeks ago against Idaho, Sunn nearly had an interception on two different occasions, and had he been to the ball one second earlier – before he and the football tumbled out of bounds – he may have picked up a first-half fumble and run it back for a touchdown.

In one way, Sunn really is not that different from a younger core that includes starting cornerbacks Ambrose Marsh and Jonathan Landry, starting safeties Jaylon Jenkins and Josiah Goode, as well as starting defensive end Tylin Jackson, all of whom are freshmen or sophomores: Like them, Sunn is getting his first chance to start on a regular basis.

“In terms of snaps playing linebacker,” Sunn said, “I made jokes after (the season opener against) Incarnate Word, I think I played more snaps in that one game than I played in five seasons at Wyoming.”

EWU head coach Aaron Best has noticed that, too.

“He’s got a lot of tread still on his tires,” Best said on Tuesday. “He’s playing his best ball, and he’s kind of playing his first ball.”

But in other, helpful ways, the 24-year-old Sunn shows his age. One of them is his knowledge of a game he has simply been playing longer than most of his teammates.

“What we got was a 24-year-old player who is physically developed,” EWU defensive coordinator Eric Sanders said last week. “We gave him an opportunity for playing time, and he took advantage of it.”

In a high school and college career that spans a decade, Sunn has played in his fair share of defensive systems.

“At the end of the day, there are only so many things you can do in football,” Sunn said. “Being a sixth-year guy, the hardest thing was learning the (defensive) terminology and wrinkles. But no matter where you go in the country, cover 2 is cover 2, and man (defense) is man (defense).”

If any of his teammates know the country, it’s Sunn. Born and raised in Wasilla, Alaska, Sunn moved four time zones to the east and 34 degrees of latitude to the south to Florida, in the spring of his freshman year of high school, to enroll at IMG Academy.

As a sophomore, he followed an IMG assistant coach to Arden, North Carolina, and he played three years for the Christ School Greenies, leading them with 130 tackles his senior year.

During his senior year, he committed to play at Wyoming.

“I couldn’t play back home (in Alaska), but I knew I wanted to get back out west somewhere,” Sunn said.

He really liked Wyoming, for many of the same reasons he likes Cheney.

“Being from a small town in Alaska,” he said, “it’s hard to find places you can play big-time college football while still having that small-town atmosphere.”

From 2020 to 2024, Sunn played in 42 games for the Cowboys, mostly on special teams and in a reserve linebacker role. But at the end of the 2024 season, Sunn sat down with the coaching staff and wanted to know what role they anticipated he would have in 2025.

The coaches were transparent about their plans to bring in transfers, Sunn said, so he decided to enter the portal last December.

It took him just eight days to make the decision that, after visiting Cheney, Eastern Washington was the right fit for him.

Sunn knew that the Eagles’ defense had struggled the last couple of seasons, but he liked what Sanders had to say. Now, he is a big part of the unit’s improvement.

Through eight games, the Eagles (4-4, 3-1 Big Sky) rank eighth in the Big Sky in scoring defense, the highest they have been this late in the season since they finished sixth in the league in 2021, the last year the Eagles reached the playoffs. Their raw numbers (31 points per game allowed this year) are much closer to that 2021 team (27.8 per game) than they are to last year’s unit (36.2 per game).

“Because we’ve got a lot of young guys playing, you notice a big improvement week to week,” Sunn said. “The last couple of weeks, it’s come together for us. It’s been a snowball effect.”

Voigtlaender said he saw the improvement coming the last couple of years.

“To see where we’ve been and where we are, there has always been this mentality at Eastern that we work hard and overcome obstacles,” the Mead High graduate said. “It was just a matter of time until our defense started to click.”

There is still work to be done, and the Eagles will face some of the Big Sky’s more formidable offenses over the last four weeks, starting Saturday at home against Sacramento State (4-4, 2-2).

Sunn said he expects that his playing days are done after this season, but he is enjoying the chance to finally get in there at linebacker. So are his parents, he said, who have flown down from Alaska for all of Eastern’s home and away games this season.

Compared to the trips they would make to see him play on the East Coast in high school, “I might as well be playing for the hometown team,” Sunn said.

About a month ago, Best challenged the team to play with joy. He did not want them to worry about results, he said. He just wanted them to “add an ingredient of joy to the process.”

Sunn certainly has embraced the mantra, and the opportunity.

“He just plays sideline to sideline, end zone to end zone,” Best said. “He just runs. He just plays. He plays free.”