When preseason camp ended last month for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team, seventh-year head coach Rusty Wright implored the team’s linebackers to earn the staff’s trust.
Wright harkened back to 2016, which was the final season of his second stint as a UTC assistant (his duties included working with linebackers) and a year when the Mocs exclusively used Nakevion Leslie and Dale Warren as the starters and hardly played any backups.
The message wasn’t as much for 2025 starters Amanuel Dickson and Zion Rutledge, who have since acquitted themselves nicely through the first month of the schedule. Rutledge leads the team in total tackles (26) and is tied for first in solo tackles (12) with defensive back Kam Baah-Slay, while Dickson is second in total tackles (24) and has intercepted a pass, and the two starting linebackers are tied for the team lead in tackles for loss with 2.5 each.
Wright’s words were directed more toward guys like Kristian Ozane, one of the nearly two dozen players who transferred in during the offseason. Ozane arrived in January after two seasons at North Carolina’s Davidson College — like UTC, a Football Championship Subdivision program, though one of the nonscholarship variety as a member of the Pioneer Football League — where he’d played more on the outside compared to UTC’s scheme and had five tackles for loss to rank second for the 2024 Wildcats during a 6-5 season.
The 5-foot-11, 223-pounder from Westlake, Louisiana, had a hamstring injury during the spring, which hampered his development at UTC, but he has appeared in all four games so far and ranks among the top 10 on the team in total tackles with nine.