During the spring, the Kansas coaching staff told Tommy Dunn he was “inconsistent.”
The redshirt junior defensive tackle wrote that word down and looked at it every morning when he woke up.
“So I could try to beat it, you know what I’m saying,” Dunn recalled this week. “Me versus me, try to beat myself.”
Several weeks into the 2024 season, it certainly looks like Dunn has won the battle. Defensive coordinator Brian Borland said he’s been one of the Jayhawks’ defensive players of the week over the course of the last couple weeks; in that stretch he has nine tackles, including two for loss, and has been KU’s highest-graded defensive lineman on Pro Football Focus.
“As I would say for guys, we want guys to consistently play at a high level and occasionally be great,” Borland said. “That’d be awesome. We can’t have the highs and the lows. Tommy was kind of a high-and-low guy in his past, and he’s really playing consistently well now, but then he shows up and makes some great plays.”
Added head coach Lance Leipold: “Tommy’s been very active and that’s great to see.”
The recognition extends beyond the Jayhawks’ own facility. West Virginia head coach Neal Brown singled Dunn out for praise ahead of Saturday’s matchup with KU, stating unprompted that he was “playing at an All-Big 12 level.”
“People are starting to recognize now, you feel me?” Dunn said. “I feel like I just got to keep going, just got to keep stacking weeks over and over, so I could actually get the all-big 12 thing, you know.”
Dunn has served as a regular contributor for KU over the last three seasons, but the opening three games of 2024 have been his first entries in the starting lineup. He’s already played 98 snaps, which would have been 52% of his 2022 total and 34% of his action in 2023; in other words, he’s on the way to a much higher workload during Big 12 play.
He attributes his success so far to his “focus level.”
“Just focusing on the details, what gap I’m supposed to be in, the checks I’m supposed to get,” he said. “And I just got my teammates encouraging me, helps me out a lot, so just being locked into the game.”
The coaches didn’t just challenge Dunn to be more consistent. They also told him his body fat percentage was far too high; he’s managed to get it down from 31% to 27%.
“Now that I’m down, I feel a lot better, I move a lot better,” he said.
Dunn and Caleb Taylor, the two starting defensive tackles against UNLV, have been at the core of a rotation that has not yet allowed an opposing running back to rush for more than 41 yards, along with contributions from Blake Herold, Kenean Caldwell and Javier Derritt.
Carter Skaggs/The Cincinnati Enquirer via AP
