Checking the tape: Monty Montgomery

“Checking the tape” is a weekly series that highlights the Ole Miss football team’s offseason acquisitions. Whether it’s coaches, transfers or recruits, sports writer Owen Pustell goes indepth and analyzes each individual. This week, Pustell takes a look at transfer linebacker Monty Montgomery.

Height/Weight/Position:

5’11/220/LB

2022 Stats with Louisville: 70 tackles, 6 sacks, 11 TFLs

Strengths

Montgomery is an e xperienced starter, and that is exactly what Ole Miss needs on defense heading into next season.

Montgomery leads returning Rebels in both sacks and tackles, making him a prime candidate to start. On the field, Montgomery displayed a strong ability to get after the passer as he registered six sacks playing off the ball. Look for him to be a blitz piece in the new defense moving forward. He has a good feel for when to rush as a delayed blitzer and flashed the ability to finesse his way past offensive linemen in both the run and pass game. In coverage, he looked solid but was relatively limited at Louisville and only dropped into the hole. Assuming the Rebels’ defense mirrors Alabama’s, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to a man-based coverage scheme.

Weaknesses

While Montgomery got a lot of playing time at Louisville, he certainly has some areas of his game that need improvement.

Primarily, he must do a better job of finishing tackles. Though I was able to get my hands on only a few games on film, I noticed that Montgomery relied a lot on arm-tackles and was an inconsistent tackler against running backs. Obviously this needs to change.

The first step is taking better angles to the ball carrier. Often, Montgomery would underrun ball carries and put himself in a compromising position that did not allow him to get his body behind the hit. Additionally, Montgomery needs to get off blocks earlier in running downs.

It seems that Montgomery prefers to go around blocks instead of taking them on and shedding them. While he does have occasional suc - cess, more often than not, he takes himself out of a gap and allows the running back to cut off the blocker and into the second level. I would like to see him do a better job of attacking linemen and either shedding them to make a tackle or hitting them hard enough to cause a traffic jam.

Maybe most importantly, Montgomery seems to play with his eyes constantly in the backfield, which is problematic when defending the pass.

First, he bites on play action and leaves the middle of the field wide open to crossing routes. Second, when he is in zone coverage, he rarely looks around to track receivers and instead watches the quarterback’s eyes. This means that high-level signal callers (often found in the SEC) will be able to look him off and attack the middle of the field more effectively.

It is crucial that he is able to increase his awareness before the SEC schedule kicks off with Alabama and LSU.

Outlook

Even though Montgomery has some steps to take, he will provide much-needed experience as the Rebels are losing their top five leading tacklers from 2022. Currently, the linebacker competition is between Suntarine Perkins, Montgomery, Jeremiah Jean-Baptiste and Khari Coleman. It’s possible that Tyler Banks can push his way into the competition, but right now I am confident that the prior four names will rotate.

Fun Fact

Montgomery was ejected for targeting against Ole Miss in 2021 for a hit to the head against quarterback Matt Corral.