WEST LONG BRANCH -- It's a Friday spring practice for Monmouth football, and the level of intensity in position drills is not up to the standard of defensive line coach Codey Cole. He calls out for his players to start buzzing their feet for up-downs.

The reprimand does the trick. Moments later in a drill that teaches lineman to absorb chips and double team blocks while keeping balance and then disengaging, Cole is ecstatic when edge rusher Jahide Lesaine executes the exercise in ideal form. The lengthy junior absorbs the blow and bends back with his immense reach in an explosive movement that should translate to a tackle for loss.

This is only spring football, several months away from the start of the season and even further removed from the defense's 31 sacks produced in 2025 (18th in the FCS). But Cole knows that winning as a defensive lineman is about being meticulous. The job is too important, and too difficult, for any other approach to suffice.

Monmouth football offense flying high at spring practice, defense retooling

"I always say it's the hardest position on the field," Cole said. "The only position where you've got to take on two people, and you're expected to win. There's nowhere else on the field that happens. We're getting downhill double teams and people trying to move us from point A to point B. And it's two men against our own will. And so if you take one wrong step or one wrong hand placement or one bad eye look or don't play with base, then you will get moved out of that gap or you could end up on the ground somewhere pancaked."

The game of inches leaves little margin for error in the most crucial location on the field. After the quarterback position, the economics of football indicate that the next most important role on the field is the men tasked with hunting the quarterback down. Those same men are tasked with controlling the line of scrimmage in the run game. To be successful, no stone must be left unturned.

With Cole in his second year coaching the defensive line, he has devised an approach that is rock solid.

"It started off with getting everybody in for winter workouts. And the once we got everybody in, it's about building a foundation," Cole said. "For us, it was building that foundation of what we call FTD—faith, toughness, and discipline. And so once we built that foundation of that faith, that toughness, and that discipline, you started to see the group kind of grow together."

With a loaded group of returning players in Bryce Rooks, Brendan Bigos, JJ Lewis, Hunter Watson, and Sebastian Achaempong, Monmouth is poised to build on last year's success. One final ingredient is the competition on the other side.

Iron sharpens iron. And despite losing four starters from last year's offensive line, this year's group has looked a twinge sharper with a slight edge through spring practices. While Cole has sparked a stark turnaround and is only heading into year two with Monmouth, offensive line coach Brian Gabriel is entering his 22nd season with the Hawks. Although the journeys are dichotomous, they are arriving at similar results.

"The new age of college football, especially at a university like ours, this is gonna be the nature of it. You're gonna have to develop guys." Gabriel said. "The new group this year, I'd certainly say there's so much talent, but there's so much inexperience. It's like we started from ground zero and we're building every single day."

As the Hawks aim to soar even higher in 2026, that aerial superiority will be built upon the unsung work in the trenches.

The impact Cole had on the defensive line was immediate in his first season at Monmouth. The sack totals were largely driven by edge defenders Lamont Lester and Josiah Graham, who combined for 19 of the 31 sacks. Lester was first team All-CAA and named defensive rookie of the year, while Graham was second team All-CAA. And as is so often the case at the FCS level, both players entered the transfer portal and Lester joined Deion Sanders' program at Colorado (Graham remains in the portal after initially committing to Memphis).

"They all wanted to be great, but they just didn't know what it looked like," Cole said. "So then it was easy for me to tell them, okay you've got to fix your habits. You've got to sacrifice things. You've gotta have a mindset of willing to grow. And then you gotta pay attention to all the details that we are actually talking about. Then you gotta push yourself past where you think you actually are."

The emphasis on faith, toughness, and discipline is a recurring theme, but it also reflects the phases of building his position group. The first aspect is naturally about spiritual wellness in addition to building camaraderie that translates once the players hit the field. The toughness can only be honed through the grind of practices, and this spring was the first taste.

"We got out here this spring, and then you start seeing people start making flashes at different plays," Cole said. "They're playing together and they're building a community with each other in brotherhood. But from there we had to become tough, right? Because then people started getting banged up, people started getting injured. The returners in the middle kind of start getting banged up so the next guys need to step up and they had to own their role. So mentally and physically, they became tougher."

Bryce Rooks was one of those top-flight experienced players that navigated some minor injury setbacks this spring. The 6-foot-1 and 300-pound defensive tackle is one of the returning starters who flourished in his first season under the tutelage of Cole. This year, he's now in a position to pass it along to the team's new additions.

"It's really special. You see a lot of these guys like Lamont and Josiah left last year, and now you see guys coming in and making plays like Jahide, (Donovan) Dyson from new schools," Rooks said. "Interior wise, we're a lot deeper than we were last year. We're doing very good. Coach Cole has been teaching us everything we need to know. I feel like we're bound to have a breakout season this year, all of us."

The defense as a whole is well-aware that although plenty of strides were made last season, improvement is still needed after the unit ranked 77th (of 126 teams) in scoring defense in the FCS in 2025. But there were also signs the unit was turning the corner, like the top 20 sack total and the 44th ranking in defensive turnovers.

But the defense also returns eight of 11 starters plus several more key rotational players in the front seven. The third aspect of Cole's philosophy, discipline, will be crucial across the entire unit. Monmouth was an abysmal 100th in the third down conversions allowed last season.