The Cardinal Countdown: 52 Days Until Kickoff

#52 Nick Dawson-Brents

Class: RS Junior

Ht/Wt: 6-3/265

Position: Linebacker

Hometown: Charlotte, NC

Twitter: N/A

Thoughts: I’ve been driving the Nick Dawson-Brents bandwagon back since the kid only had one last name. To this day his commitment is still burned into my frontal lobe, probably because I was so excited to see an All-American show the Cards some love on national TV. I think even as this scenario becomes more familiar to us as fans Nick and James Quick will always stand out too me as the two players I really expressed an interest in during their recruitment and senior seasons. They were nationally known players who picked UofL over the traditional powers, and that's pretty cool to me. The rest of the recruiting craziness I try to avoid…you know, the whole ‘creepy’ thing.

If you look back at my recap last year I tried to remind anyone who may have been disappointed with Dawson-Brents’ production thus far who he was sitting behind on the depth chart. I think we have to get used to the fact that true freshman are not likely to walk through the door and unseat a veteran, as they did in 2010, who has waited his turn for two or three seasons. This Junior class of linebackers is pretty damn impressive (Brown, Kelsey, Dawson-Brents, and Fields) and we’ve got some talented Sophomores waiting in the wing as well. We don’t rebuild, we relo…Nope. Can’t do it.

Nick has the talent to play inside as he did in high school but it appears he will be the top candidate to try and replace Mount on the outside this season. Nick played in 12 games last year but most of his time was relegated to Special Teams. He did record 5 tackles but I expect that number to increase significantly in 2015. I said last year I would be shocked if he wasn’t a starter in 2015 and the jury is still out on that right now. The spring depth chart had Keith Brown penciled in at the ‘SAM’ position but Nick was limited at the time due to injury. I’ll stick with my 2014 prediction and say Dawson-Brents trots out there as the starter on September 5^th and while I’m going all Nostradamus on you fools…he’ll have a sack in that game as well. Book it.

Sweet Tweet:

No twitter for NDB but I thought I throw this out there for those who may have missed it. Back on July 6^th John Ramsey had DeAngelo Brown and Pio Vatuvei in studio on a little radio show called ‘Ramsey and Rutherford’ on 93.9 The Ville. (Mike doubled my salary today for that cross promotion). Feel free to check out the whole thing but starting at around the 15:30 mark John asks both players who they think Cards fans should be on the lookout for this year…spoiler alert, Nick is one of them.