Alley Seeking Growth and Improvement From West Virginia’s Defense in 2026

Photo by: WVU Athletic Communications

Alley Seeking Growth and Improvement From West Virginia’s Defense in 2026

August 06, 2026 02:55 PM | Football

By: John Antonik

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Second-year West Virginia University defensive coordinator Zac Alley is seeking more consistency from his unit in 2026.

He termed last year's defense "boom or bust" with the busts during the middle portion of the season leading to blowout defeats to Kansas, Utah, BYU and UCF.

zac-alley

It was during that stretch of games when West Virginia really struggled to keep its head above water. For the season, the Mountaineers ranked near the bottom of the Big 12 in scoring and total defense, primarily because their secondary was statistically the worst in the conference allowing 251.2 yards per game, which was 128^th out of 136 FBS teams.

Consequently, personnel changes were in order.

After a full spring with a mostly retooled roster, Alley believes the continuity from the spring to the summer to the present has been good so far.

"I think 90% of the team was here for spring ball with a couple of new additions in the summer, but to get guys who have been out there and practiced with us before, you could see the carryover from the spring and the summer working things that we've done before," he said following Wednesday's practice. "That's refreshing that they knew what the calls were and they knew what we were doing. There was some consistent coaching going on there.

"Obviously, it's good having the team intact from then to now," he added.

One aspect of play Alley was satisfied with last year was the players' ability to attack the football and create turnover opportunities. Now, he wants his guys to do a better job of capitalizing on those opportunities.

"I think we were either one or two in the country last year at that," he admitted. "We've got to recover more of them this year. We weren't very good at that. We'd punch it out and couldn't get on it."

By and large, Alley thought his staff did a fairly good job of putting players in positions to make plays. This year, it's a matter of finishing them.

"There are some calls I'd take back, too, where I'd say, 'That's dumb. I wish we would have been in this' and that wouldn't have happened, or what not. I think you saw the gap in maybe our ability and the ability of some of the teams we played was probably larger last season," he mentioned. "You try and help guys schematically and you are trying to search for things to consistently try and help them get into position to play well. And we did that sometimes and we didn't at other times.

"We were going to hold you to 21 and win the game in overtime, or we were going to give 49 up and get blown out," he continued. "There was no consistency to our performance, and that kind of takes the character of the team and the discipline of the players and the coaches to keep it consistent to get them to where they need to go. I'm very pleased, at least, with where the buy-in of our team is from an overall team standpoint, and we've still got a lot of work to do, but to me that's the biggest difference is getting guys aligned and going the right way."

A lot of the defenders out on the field this fall are going to be new to Mountaineer fans, which will require some familiarizing.

Alley says he subscribes to the 10-80-10 rule to team building.

"Ten percent of guys are going to perform and be the type of people you want them to be every day, regardless of the environment, the leadership or the people around them," he mentioned. "Ten percent, no matter what you do, are probably going to be on the bottom end. They are not going to perform to their potential all the time, and so we are always focused on that middle 80 and how they swing based on how the culture of the team is and how the culture of the locker room is.

"They are going to go up, and they are going to go down, so to me, it's a matter of getting more of the top 10 percenters who can bring the rest of the 80 percenters up with them," he said. "The core nucleus of our team is more toward the top 10 percent right now than it was last year at the same time, but it's still got to trend upward the entire time. You are either going up, or you are going down, there's no staying the same."

Among the top 10-percenters, one appears to be Wisconsin transfer Geimere Latimer II, an attendee at last month's Big 12 media day in Frisco, Texas.

Latimer has experience playing in Alley's defense when the two were together at Jacksonville State, and he is expected to take over Fred Perry's old spot at nickel safety where Perry led the team with 78 tackles.

"G is a great player, and he's an even better person," Alley noted. "He's going to bring the group with him. He's going to be full speed on every single play, and I think he's going to have a really good role and career here. To me, he fell right back in line and obviously being around me and being around Coach (Rodriguez), he's basically a third-year player in the system even though he was gone for one season."

As far as similarities to Perry, Alley said they are different types of players.

"G was a corner, cover-nickel type who can blitz and fit in the box. I don't worry about him because he's not soft. He'll go in there and hit you, but you weren't trying to put Fred on an island every snap out there in man coverage," Alley said. "Fred was kind of leaning towards the linebacker body type, and G kind of leans towards the corner, safety type."

Up front is where Alley hopes to see the biggest growth and development this fall. Again, these guys are mostly unproven Big 12 players, with the exception of junior Nate Gabriel, who has appeared in 24 career games for the Mountaineers, and sophomore Corey McIntyre Jr., who played in nine games last year after battling back from a significant offseason knee injury two years ago.

Another potential contributor, defensive end Zeke Durham-Campbell, will be going up against his old team when West Virginia opens its season against Coastal Carolina on Saturday, Sept. 5.

Other guys in the mix at those three spots include defensive ends Darius Wiley, Brandon Caesar, Wilnerson Telemaque, Carter Kessler and Emerson Joy; defensive tackles KJ Henson, Yendor Mack and Gabe Ryan; and nose guards Will LeBlanc, Taylor Brown, Cam Mallory and Jaylen Thomas.

The list of bandit players includes Harper Holloman, Jeremiah Johnson, David Afogho, Tobi Haastrup and Noah Tishendorf. Holloman played last year at Western Kentucky, Johnson at Butte Community College, Afogho at Bowling Green, Haastrup at Oregon and Tishendorf at Lakeridge High in Sherwood, Oregon.

Most of these guys have been Morgantown residents for less than nine months.

"I've challenged our front four because I want us to be better there," Alley said. "We've got some guys who are talented enough, and now it's putting it together and showing the physicality and doing their job every single day.

"Because of the nature of it, the D-line has a hard time throughout the summer because you are not actually going against each other," he explained. "You are not banging and doing the things that are actually football, per se, like playing the game, whereas the secondary and the DBs had the ability to have more reps because you can get some good on good. I think we are probably a little farther ahead in the backend, mainly because they had an opportunity in the summer to actually get the reps to do it."

Getting a difference maker coming off the edge like David Bailey was at Texas Tech last year is what every defensive coach in America craves.

"You look at the top teams in the country, and when you get the (second) overall draft pick coming off the edge with 17 sacks, I mean that helps," Alley laughed.

The linebackers are fairly interchangeable, although Alley prefers keeping the younger and more inexperienced players at one spot rather than cross-training them. In that group, will linebacker Cam Torbor appears to be a young player with lots of potential that Alley wishes would have fallen under the newly adopted "five-for-five" category last season.

"He would have played all year in some capacity," the coordinator observed. "At that point you didn't want to burn a kid's year on 15 snaps or whatever, but he'll play will for us and some of our sub-packages – our sam overhang or our blitzing kind of jack backer – he kind of cross-trains at our sub-package stuff more than he does at mike and will."

The list of will and mike linebackers feature, in alphabetical order, Ben Cutter, Troy Fischer, Isaiah Patterson and Tyler Stolsky at mike, and Cameron Dwyer, Jason Hall Jr., Malachi Hood, Torbor and Ashton Woods at will.

The back end is where significant retooling was required, specifically at corner where acquiring length was a big offseason priority. Among the pool of corners, six on this year's roster stand 6-foot or taller, including 6-foot-3, 210-pound Chams Diagne, a Georgia State transfer. Hutchinson Community College transfer Da'Mun Allen is 6-foot-5, while Hutchinson teammate Rayshawn Reynolds Jr. is listed at 6-foot-3.

Nick Taylor, who transferred in last year from Appalachian State and had 20 tackles and an interception, has measurables of 6-feet-1, 193 pounds – good size for a Big 12 cornerback.

At the safety spots, in addition to Latimer, the pool of players in those positions include, in alphabetical order, Jayden Ballard, Maliek Hawkins, Miles Khatri and Emory Snyder at nickel; Alex Adebayo, Jacob Bradford, Andrew Powdrell, Tim Roberson and Matt Sieg at free; and Shane Cornali, Rickey Giles, Kameron Reddic, Da'Mare Williams and Kamari Wilson at bandit.

Again, plenty of new names to learn.

"We're pretty hybrid with what we do in general," Alley said. "Guys play all over the place and do different things for us, so we'll try and identify our best 11 throughout camp and we'll match the scheme to fit those guys and play them wherever they can be successful."

Alley indicated that they remain open to adding another player or two before the start of the season, based on how these pending court cases are decided. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of clarity on the situation right now. He said conditioning will be the biggest hurdle to any late newcomer potentially seeing early action.

"If you go down the 24/7 page, you see this guy is working at a car wash in San Bernadino. It's like that's what he's doing," Alley chuckled. "You've got guys who, for six months, have been out there in the real world going to work every day and not training like a football player, so I worry more about the physical side of saying, 'Hey, is this guy going to be ready for week one?' That's probably tough, given the short amount of time."

Overall, Alley said many lessons were learned during his first season coordinating West Virginia's defense in the Big 12 in 2025.

"The biggest thing was the character and the people you have matters. It's important," he said. "You've got to do a great job of fostering the positives and the things you are looking for and highlighting those things and squashing the negativity and the other parts of how guys can get when things don't go their way. I think that was something we are trying to do a really good job of is steering the team in that direction right now.

"Obviously, when you get to a new league and you play new opponents and people you have never seen, things are different from conference to conference a lot of times, so just having the experience of coming back and playing some of the teams we played last year I think is a helpful thing," he concluded.

The team conducted its second practice of fall camp up on the Steve Antoline Family Practice Facility earlier today. Two more practices in shells are planned for Friday and Saturday before the players hit the pause button on on-field activities on Sunday.

The first full practice of fall camp is scheduled for next Tuesday.