Texas Tech football: Five underrated players from the Kingsbury era

LB Micah Awe made plays all over the field

At Texas Tech, we love our undersized LBs that fly all over the field.  While far from reaching the legendary status of Zach Thomas, who made that type of LB popular in Lubbock, Micah Awe also fit that bill from 2012-15.

Generously listed at 6-feet and 220-pounds, the Arlington native came up with 263 career tackles, 169 of which were of the solo variety.  As a senior, he had a monster year with 126 tackles (6.5 for loss).

His best game came in 2015 when he had 17 stops against LSU in the Texas Bowl.  It was one of nine career 10-tackle games.

While he was far from the prototypical LB in terms of size, he was able to make a living in the pass-happy Big 12 thanks to his sideline-to-sideline speed, which allowed him to cover tons of ground in the open field.

Since leaving Tech, he has had two tastes of life in the NFL on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers practice squad and as an offseason member of the New York Jets.  But while he has not appeared in an NFL game, he’s had a successful career in Canada where he’s made 129 combined tackles in three seasons.

Like Eguavoen, Awe was part of some awful defenses at Tech and many of us might not have noticed the work he did because, during those years, we watched the Red Raider defense with our hands over our eyes.  Still, he was a very productive player who beat the odds given his size and he was the type of player that Red Raider fans love to pull for.