Tyler Jones finished the 2007 season with 51 tackles, despite starting fewer than half of SMU's games (photo by SMU athletics).

Talk about getting kicked in the deep end.

As he prepared for his redshirt freshman season in 2007, Tyler Jones expected to fill some level of a backup safety role. Then, before the season started, transfer Rock Dennis went down with a broken shoulder. An already-thin SMU secondary was thinner, meaning Jones’ playing time should increase, yet coaches still referred to him as “another guy in the mix.” In other words, they weren’t convinced he was ready to take over.

For seven games, the losses piled up for the Ponies … as did injuries in the secondary. Through the first seven games, Jones never started, earned spot duty and piled up five tackles — total. But when Mustang defensive backs continued to get hurt, the SMU coaches had to piece together new combinations in the secondary. Bryan McCann was moved over from cornerback, and Jones found himself in the starting lineup.

The Emory, Texas native said that on their initial outing as the Mustangs’ starting safety, he and McCann “had fun. Neither of us had ever played safety (as starters at the college level). We weren’t really sure what we were doing, and we were playing Tulsa, whose had the No. 3 offense in the country.”

But Jones didn’t buckle in front of the Golden Hurricane offense. Instead, he piled up a team-high 15 tackles. As if to prove it wasn’t a fluke, he added another 15 the following week at Houston. He finished the season with 51 tackles, the eighth-highest total on the team — rather gaudy numbers for someone who had such a limited role for more than half the season.

Now, Jones said, he’s almost starting over. He said he still doesn’t know if the coaches plan to start him, even though he and Dennis have been running with the first-team defense since the start of preseason camp. In addition, he’s learning the new defense installed by defensive coordinator Tom Mason.

“I don’t know that they’ve written anybody in” as starters, Jones said. “Justin (Willis) started the last two years at quarterback, and he’s competing for his job, right? I’ve been working with Rock, but I don’t think anything has been guaranteed to anyone yet. It’s better that way, anyway.”

The new defense, he said, doesn’t call for completely different set of responsibilities from its safeties, but Jones said he remains on the beginning end of the learning curve, nonetheless.

“I like it,” he said of Mason’s system. “We’ll run a lot of different things. We’ve heard, from our offense, that they can’t always tell what coverages we’re running. We don’t man up all the time — we should be able to fool some people sometimes.”

Jones has been working with Rock Dennis as the first-team safeties in new coordinator Tom Mason's scheme (photo by Webmaster).

While Mason is the architect behind the new SMU defense, the 6-foot-1, 200-pound Jones said part of his confidence in his team’s ability to run the new system is the faith he has in new secondary coach Derrick Odum.

“I told my dad (Odum) is one of the best coaches I’ve ever been around,” Jones said. “One of the things he has helped all of us with is having a short memory. If we mess up, it’s six points, but he’s really good about helping us be aggressive and staying under control. He knows when to get on us, and when to teach.”

Whether he ends up as a starter when the Ponies kick off the season Aug. 29 at Rice remains to be seen, but Jones said the returning and new talent in the SMU secondary, coupled with the defensive teachings of Mason and Odum, will go a long way toward helping the defense improve after a disappointing 2007 season.

“We’ve got some really cornerbacks who can lock people down,” Jones said of McCann and Derrius Bell. “Then you add the young guys, like Chris Banjo. He’s a smart guy — he must have had good high school coaches, because he’s caught on to what we’re doing really quickly. He’s a good athlete and obviously a smart guy.”

How the new and returning SMU talent gels will be determined in the coming weeks and months. But for Jones, the progress from the emergency starter against Tulsa last year to possible starter in 2008 already has been significant.

“I’m still learning this defense — we all are,” Jones said. “But even though we’re in a new system, I know it better. We all know it better.

“Now we just have to take what they’re teaching us and do it in games.”