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With all the veterans returning to Pitt’s defense in 2018, it’s easy to overlook a redshirt freshman who hasn’t seen the field yet in his college career.

Chances are, Jaylen Twyman won’t be overlooked for much longer.

“I’ll let my actions be the answer, but I feel like I can be a dominant force and help win a lot of games,” Twyman said last week.

For his coaches and teammates, Twyman has been a standout in training camp month, building on a strong spring camp and even an impressive performance during his redshirt year last season. Pitt stayed relatively healthy at defensive tackle in 2017, but it would have only taken one key injury to get Twyman on the field; that’s how close he was to the two-deep.

Now, a year older and a year wiser, Twyman is ready to jump headfirst into that two-deep. And not only does he have age and knowledge on his side - he’s also got physical improvement, as a year with strength and conditioning coach Dave Andrews and the team’s sports dietician, Katherine Hopkins, has changed his body.

“I was 315 when I first got here; right now I’m 285,” Twyman said, adding that he hasn’t weighed 285 pounds since his sophomore year of high school.

The other thing he hasn’t done since he was a sophomore at H.D. Woodson in Washington, D.C., is stay out of the backfield. Twyman had 17 sacks in his junior and senior seasons combined, and that’s something Pitt could use from its defensive tackles.

Since Aaron Donald’s all-world performance in 2013, when he had 11 sacks and 28.5 tackles for loss, the defensive tackle position have been unproductive, to say the least. Shakir Soto had the best season of a Pitt tackle in the last four years when he recorded 10 tackles for loss and 4.5 sacks in 2016 (the year he moved from end to tackle).

Outside of that, no other Pitt defensive tackle since 2013 has reached 10 tackles for loss or more than two sacks.

Last season, the tackles were particularly unproductive. Amir Watts set the high-water mark with five tackles for loss, and he and Shane Roy had one sack each; no other tackles recorded a sack, and Watts was the only one with more than 1.5 tackles for loss.

In total, the position was responsible for 8.5 tackles for loss and two sacks. That’s a far cry from what Donald did in his time as a Panther, and while that’s a high bar to reach, Twyman has had some direct exposure to the former Pitt standout and current Los Angeles Ram this summer during training sessions, and he hasn’t let the unique opportunity pass.

“Every time I catch up with him, I ask him a thousand questions,” Twyman said of Donald. “I mean, I pick his brain a lot, just asking him questions about how he gets off the field and what he keys, what he eats, how he sleeps - just watching him work, it gives me a little drive, you know, being a D-tackle and playing for the University of Pittsburgh.”

In the meantime, Twyman has been spending plenty of time with Pitt defensive line coach Charlie Partridge, who has had high praise for the redshirt freshman. In turn, Twyman gives Partridge a lot of credit for the development of his knowledge of the game.

“That’s all a credit to Coach Partridge - a lot of late nights and early mornings and meeting and stuff, he has helped me to better my game from a mental aspect - and Coach (Randy) Bates and Coach (Pat) Narduzzi, all of them just keep coaching me on. And I might even go over to the offensive side to see Coach (Dave) Borbely and ask him questions about, ‘How can I get better?’”