Cole Blaylock has made two jumps at once — from high school football to Division I college football, and from offensive standout at UMS-Wright to defensive contributor at South Alabama. The move is paying off, both for Blaylock and the Jaguars.
After absorbing several losses on defense following last season, whether through graduation or the transfer portal, new defensive coordinator Todd Orlando needed players to step forward and fill important roles. Blaylock is one of them. With three years of college experience — he redshirted in 2023, playing just three games, then appeared in 24 of the Jags’ 25 games over the past two seasons, primarily on special teams — the 6-foot-0, 180-pound safety has taken on a key role in the secondary. Through the spring and preseason, he has shown he is ready to be both a starter and a leader.
‘He’s not afraid to put his nose in there’
“I love watching him play because he squeezes the rag and gets every drop out of it,” South Alabama head coach Major Applewhite said. “He’s not afraid to put his nose in there. He will hit you. He will tackle. He’s disciplined.”
Applewhite added that Blaylock is “sound” and “physical” and has been around the ball often in early practices, saying the next step is “getting greedy and catching” interceptions.
For a staff installing a new defensive system, a safety who masters the calls quickly has outsize value. Safeties are the secondary’s communicators — the position that relays alignments, diagnoses motion and adjusts the back end when offenses try to stress it. A player who earns that trust in his first shot at a starting role changes what the defensive staff can ask of the unit as a whole.
In 2024, Blaylock played in 12 of 13 games, collecting 10 total tackles, five of them solo. Last season, he appeared in all 12 games with 12 total tackles, a fumble recovery, an interception and a pass breakup. His production is expected to grow this year — a reasonable expectation given that his previous contributions came largely on special teams, with defensive snaps arriving only sparingly behind more experienced safeties.
Finding a home at safety
“It’s been really fun. You get to step up and get to play. I mean, that’s the name of the game,” Blaylock said. “Boundary safety to me is one of the most fun positions on the field in this defense. You get to read the quarterback’s eyes, and you just get to play football.”
Of Orlando’s scheme, he said fans can “expect a lot of aggression, physicality and some explosive plays coming out of the defense this year.”
The boundary safety role he described suits his profile. The position demands sure tackling in the run game, quick recognition against slot receivers and the nerve to come up in support against larger ball carriers — demands his offensive background helps him anticipate.
The role marks a sharp change from Blaylock’s days as a UMS-Wright standout, where he was a first-team All-State running back as a senior, rushing for 2,029 yards and 27 touchdowns and earning Alabama Sports Writers Association (ASWA) Class 5A Back of the Year honors. As a junior, he ran for 1,398 yards and 19 scores.
Recruiters noticed his full-speed offensive style — including his blocking and pass-catching — but also saw promise in his defensive play for the Bulldogs.
Learning the other side
“It was definitely a difficult transition in the first year or two,” Blaylock said. “But now I feel like I’m really starting to get it. And honestly, playing offense really helped me in defense because I understand run gaps…I just had to get my feet right to be guarding all these 4.4 receivers in college.”
He said the speed of the college game and the required footwork were the biggest adjustments, but that “the game starts to slow down for you” with more reps.
That dual perspective is exactly what defensive coaches prize in a safety. A former ball carrier knows how runners read blocking angles, where cutback lanes appear and how an offense tries to manipulate the second level — knowledge that translates directly to filling gaps and diagnosing plays from the back of the defense. The part that could not be carried over from UMS-Wright was the acceleration of the college game, where slot receivers run routes against high school defensive backs the way high school backs ran against linebackers.
His progress track is a familiar one for positional conversions: redshirt, special teams, spot duty, then a full-time role once the technique catches up with the athleticism. Blaylock’s three-year apprenticeship — three games in 2023, then 24 of 25 over two seasons — put him on the far side of that curve just as the depth chart opened in front of him.
The UMS-Wright pipeline
Blaylock’s path from UMS-Wright to South Alabama continues a well-worn Mobile connection. The Bulldogs’ program, a persistent contender in Class 5A with multiple state championships this century, has sent a steady stream of players into the Jaguars’ roster, and Mobile’s high school pipelines are a recruiting priority for a program whose campus sits minutes from UMS-Wright’s in the city’s Midtown district.
Playing for the city’s high school powers and then the city’s Division I program compresses the distance between a Mobile recruit’s two football lives. At a school like UMS-Wright — where championship expectations and structured, detail-oriented coaching mirror the demands of a college program — players arrive at the next level already trained in accountability and preparation.
That background shows in the qualities Applewhite cited: the discipline, the physicality, the habit of squeezing every rep out of a practice. Blaylock’s own framing of his high school-to-college leap — difficult, then gradually clarifying — is the standard arc for Mobile products who stay home, and his emergence as a potential starter gives the Jaguars’ staff another proof point on the recruiting trail.
Playing at home
Playing college football in his hometown has been a major plus, Blaylock said.
“It means everything, just knowing that you have so many supporters. And even my first game here, I made a tackle, and I just could hear the crowd…they were literally at practice today. So it just means a lot to be able to play for the same town that I grew up playing in.”
For a hometown player, the support runs both ways. Family, former coaches and high school teammates can attend every home game, and local products become points of connection between the program and the city’s high school community. When a Jaguar who grew up a short drive from campus makes a tackle, the crowd includes the people who watched him make them in a Bulldogs uniform.
That familiarity also raises the standard. A hometown starter answers to an audience that knows his history, and a player who treats practices with the intensity Blaylock has shown gives the staff an example rooted in the same program the school’s recruits know best.
The season ahead
South Alabama, coming off a 4-8 season, enters its third week of preseason practice. The Jaguars open the season Saturday, Sept. 5, against Southeastern Louisiana at Hancock Whitney Stadium, with kickoff set for 6 p.m.
The opener begins a pivotal stretch for a program regrouping after a losing year. The defensive overhaul that pushed Blaylock into the lineup is part of that reset: Orlando’s arrival brought a new scheme, and the portal-and-graduation losses that emptied the secondary forced the staff to weigh young, unproven players against transfers. Blaylock’s emergence through spring and preseason practice represents the homegrown answer to that question.
The Sept. 5 date at Hancock Whitney Stadium gives the rebuilt defense an early, visible test. Southeastern Louisiana brings an established FCS program to Mobile, the kind of opener that punishes communication breakdowns — exactly the area where a first-year starter at boundary safety is most likely to be measured.
Between now and then, the Jaguars’ practices will settle the remaining position battles, and Blaylock’s continued hold on the starting role would cap a conversion that began with a recruiting evaluation three years ago: the staff that saw a running back with a safety’s instincts was right about the second part. His high school totals — the 2,029 yards, the 27 touchdowns, the Class 5A Back of the Year award — made his offensive ability a matter of record. What this season will test is the other half of the evaluation, the one that moved a Mobile star from the backfield to the back end of the defense.
Orlando’s system raises the stakes for that measurement. His defenses have built their reputation on pressure and playmaking — blitzes from the second level, safeties who close on the ball and turnovers forced in bunches — and the boundary safety position sits at the hinge of it. The player lined up there must be right when the call is aggressive, because the defense behind him has sold out to make a play.
That is where Blaylock’s apprenticeship becomes an asset beyond tackling. Three years of practicing against the Jaguars’ own offenses have shown him the route concepts, the motion packages and the pace of a college attack from the scout side. The interception and fumble recovery he recorded last season, modest as the counting numbers were, came in limited snaps — evidence the staff cites when it predicts his production is positioned to climb.
The depth chart context matters too. When a starter loses his job to graduation or the portal, the replacement inherits snaps that were never distributed by merit alone. Blaylock did not take anyone’s role this fall; he took a vacancy, and filled it quickly enough that the coaches’ spring evaluations kept him in the first group. For a program rebuilding its defense, retaining a homegrown player with three years in the system carries continuity value no transfer can provide.
