Southern Miss football has lost a top transfer. How might USM replace him?
The Southern Miss football team will be without one of the bigger name transfers that first-year head coach Will Hall added in December.
Hall confirmed Thursday that former Missouri defensive tackle Montra Edwards is no longer with the team and plans to attend junior college.
“I wish him well,” Hall said Thursday. “I’m great friends with his high school defensive line coach, and his dad is the defensive line coach at Holmes Community College.
“It’s just a deal where he needed to go back home, be around family and go to junior college. He’s not going to be with us, and we wish him well.”
Edwards is a 6-foot-3, 295-pound player who could have added some size on the interior of the USM defensive line this season. He sat out the 2020 season at Missouri as a redshirt.
A three-start prospect out of Holmes County Central High School, Edwards chose Missouri over a long list of offers that included Arkansas, Nebraska, Auburn, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and LSU.
The departure of Edwards leaves Hall with an open scholarship to potentially add a transfer on the defensive line this summer.
Hall seems inclined to stick with the group of linemen he has, but he did leave open the door to look for another defensive lineman.
“We’ve got (Memphis transfer) Everitt Cunningham coming in this summer,” Hall said. “We feel pretty good about what we’re working with right now.”
Asked if he might instead look into adding another option to an undersized batch of running backs, Hall says he wouldn’t necessarily look to bring in a big-bodied back. He does seem to like the idea of bringing in another player to bolster the depth chart.
“Our size doesn’t bother me like everyone else,” Hall said. “For every Derrick Henry, there’s an Alvin Kamara. We just want production. We are a little thin at the spot, but we’ve got to find a great human being that brings value. They have to fit into our culture. That’s something we’ll address at that time, and we’ll keep coaching the ones we’ve got. They’re definitely better after eight days than they were to start the spring for sure.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2021 at 11:13 AM.
