Senior Brandon Smith and junior Koa Farmer have been teammates for three seasons.
But up until practice five days ago, they never lined up side-by-side as first-team linebackers.
Ever.
In fact, two months ago, both were buried on the Penn State depth chart – Smith at third-team middle linebacker and Farmer as a second-team strong safety.
Now, they may be the unlikeliest defensive duo since Salt & Pepper.
Smith and Farmer made their mark in Penn State’s win over Maryland in Beaver Stadium on Saturday, when they combined for 19 tackles (14 by Smith), an interception, a fumble-causing quarterback sack and 2.5 tackles for losses.
“It’s nice to see Koa not only playing, but making an impact,” Penn State coach James Franklin said after the game. “He’s always been a talented guy. It was just a matter of finding a home for him that he embraced and that fit our defense. He’s a little bit of an older player now, with more experience and he’s running with this right now — which is big for us. Getting Brandon Smith back and being able to move Manny (Bowen) back to the outside linebacker spot helped us.”
Their journeys to being linebackers at Sam (Farmer) and Mike (Smith) are as different as their East and West Coast hometowns.
NEAR AND FAR
Smith is 22-1/2, and the married guy who hails from down the road in Lewisburg, less than an hour from Beaver Stadium. He was a brutish high school wrestler, with a 110-15 record and a runner-up finish in the PIAAs as a high school senior.
Smith was also the breakout star of the Temple game, gathering eight tackles after coming in when Nyeem Wartman-White went down and out. His fame only swelled a week later in Ann Arbor, when he was tossed in the first quarter against Michigan for a targeting penalty that was…well, not targeting.
Farmer, two years younger, has been a hybrid for most of his Nittany Lion career. Sturdy and fast, he couldn’t quite find a permanent home as a returner, in the secondary or at linebacker. And he was so far away from his real home – it’s 2,246 miles from PSU to Lake View Terrace, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb in the San Fernando Valley – that at times he wondered what he was doing in Central PA. (On Saturday, he likened his sack to riding a big wave in Hawaii on his boogie board.)
Both are good guys, liked by their teammates and over the past few years respected for their daily performances in practice, where both would regularly provide some awe-inspiring performances. They shared team meetings when the overall defense met, but were far from best buds.
They practiced together during those on-again, off-again moments when Farmer was flip-flopping between the secondary and the linebacking corps, working with D-coordinator Brent Pry & Co. watching video and running drills.
But they never practiced side-by-side at linebacker until last Tuesday. That’s when Farmer was named to the first-team linebacking trio, next to Smith. A month ago, it would have been an unlikely pairing, at best. Then the worst happened, as linebacker after linebacker was injured. (Seven, by Franklin’s count.)
PRYING A LOOK
Hours after Wartman-White was lost for the season, Farmer was at dinner, hosting a Penn State recruit. That’s when he got The Look, which eventually led to The Starting Nod. Pry, who is the linebackers coach as well as Penn State’s master puzzler-solver in 2016, was the man giving all the signals.
“At dinner that night, Coach Pry was looking at me,” Farmer recalled with a nervous, kind of “uh-oh” laugh. “And I was like, ‘I already know.’”
“Do you want to get on the field?” Pry asked Farmer, who has spent his time at Penn State as a self-described “utility guy.”
“I’ll do whatever I can to get on the field and help my team,” Farmer replied. And he meant it. “It wasn’t a hard transition. When I came in the game before that, on certain packages, I was playing linebacker.”
The highlight of Farmer’s game on Saturday was also the highlight of his Penn State career, as late in the second quarter he blitzed from the offside and sacked Maryland quarterback Perry Hills from behind, forcing him to fumble and lose the football. It came at a crucial juncture, the very next play after Maryland blocked a Penn State punt.
“I needed a big play in there,” said Farmer, who was making his first start. “I needed to show people what I can do. And I need to continually get those big plays. Coming off the edge and the quarterback’s looking the other way – my eyes are getting big. I’m like, ‘Please don’t throw this,’ because I didn’t want to get a penalty. Right there I hit him. That’s my highlight of the season…so far.”
Smith, for one, wasn’t surprised. Especially that Farmer used his 4.4 40 speed to get to Hills.
“Koa’s a really fast guy. He’s the fastest linebacker who’s played here in awhile. He uses that to his advantage,” Smith said. “It was his first start at linebacker and he came up with the big sack fumble. He played a really solid game and each week he’s going to get better and get more confidence. He’s learning the same position.”
Farmer is confident there’s more of that to come.
“I’ve always had confidence,” Farmer said. “It’s just more about getting out there, getting my opportunity and showing the coaches and the team what I can do. I knew it was in me somewhere. I just wanted to show my teammates, show myself, show the coaches, show everybody why I’m here. Like, ‘I came all the way from California, so why am I here?’”
NOT FROM ‘NOWHERE, MAN’
Farmer knows now. In fact, he feels the same way about Smith, who spent the previous three seasons on the scout team and then Penn State special teams. When asked about Smith coming from nowhere to emerge as Penn state’s third-leading tackler this fall (with 31 tackles), Farmer bristled a bit.
“B Smith didn’t come from nowhere, man,” Farmer said. “He’s always been here. He’s always been waiting on his opportunity, just like me.”
Smith, in his own way, expressed that he, too, never lost confidence in himself.
“You know, we’ve always trusted in our abilities,” he said. “Obviously, I’ve had a bigger role playing. I’ve tried to take advantage of it and have fun. I’m still preparing the same way. We’re just trying to enjoy the process and appreciate what we have here.”
Since his breakout performance, Smith has been the object of a lot of media attention – from newspapers, websites, and, especially, via social media. (A story on this site about Smith three weeks ago was among the most popular of the 2016 season. Read it here.)
“It’s been humbling. It’s incredible how many people across the state and the community have reached out to me on Facebook and things like that, encouraging me,” he said. “My support from my high school back in Lewisburg has been awesome. They made me a little video for me, saying ‘good luck’ for this game. It’s been incredible and truly humbling what God has done these past few weeks, opening doors for me.”
NOT THAT PICKY
Smith was also humbled by his first career interception, which came off a tip by defensive end Garrett Sickels and right into Smith’s hands. Smith felt a bit awkward as he explained how easy it was. But not too much.
“To be honest with you, last week I dropped an interception” against Minnesota, he said. “So today I probably could have kept my feet there. But I was just thinking, ‘Don’t drop this ball.’ The D-line did a good job of getting pressure and I think it was Sickels who did a good job of getting pressure there. They did a great job up front and it was a pretty easy ball to catch.”
It was one of many post-game aw-shucks moments by Smith. He tries hard to downplay his newfound celebrity; it’s not who is.
But these days, a lot more people certainly do know who he is.
“It hasn’t changed that much,” he said, then recounted a bit. “There was this one time in a class. A guy came up to me and said, ‘Are you 47? …I knew it.’”
Attention kids in Koa’s Monday classes: He’s No. 7.
