SEATTLE — Jordan Reffett misses the old Daniel Te’o-Nesheim. The timid freshman he remembers from two seasons ago.
Never mind that Te’o-Nesheim is playing better than ever and is one of the team’s most productive defensive linemen, Reffett misses the Te’o-Nesheim that used to do whatever he and fellow senior Greyson Gunheim told him to do.
“He doesn’t listen anymore,” Reffett said. “He’s getting sacks and doing other stuff, so he thinks he’s too cool for me and Greyson now.”
Two years after coming to Washington as an unassertive freshman, Te’o-Nesheim is starting to open up around his teammates, and open eyes on the football field. Five games into the season, the defensive end from Waikoloa, Hawaii, leads the Huskies, and is eighth in the Pac-10, with 41/2 sacks.
“The seniors on the line, we’d make fun of him a lot because he was really shy and didn’t talk, and he really worried about everything,” Gunheim said. “Whenever we’d tell him something or try to help him out, he’d say ‘OK, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ really tentatively. But now, when he talks to the younger guys, he yells at them and makes fun of them. It’s funny for us to see how he’s grown, just his whole attitude. Really kind of this summer, he started to open up.”
Te’o-Nesheim is still quiet around the media, but Gunheim insists he’s a character around his teammates.
“In certain situations, he’ll just say the dumbest thing to try to make you laugh,” he said.
After redshirting during his first year at Washington, Te’o-Nesheim started all 12 games last season. He finished the year with five sacks and 35 tackles, and was named to The Sporting News’ Pac-10 All-Freshman team. So far this season, he leads Washington’s defensive linemen with 21 tackles, has 5.5 tackles for loss, and one forced fumble. While his numbers are up substantially from last year, Te’o-Nesheim thinks he and the rest of the line can be better.
“I think maybe I’m playing harder because I kind of know the system a little more and I’m not as worried as what other teams are going to do,” Te’o-Nesheim said. “But I pictured us making a lot more plays than what we have done so far.”
When the Huskies play seventh-ranked Oregon on Saturday, Te’o-Nesheim hopes to show an old friend just how much he’s changed on the field. Ducks center Max Unger graduated one year ahead of Te’o-Nesheim at Hawaii Prep, and the two were teammates on the offensive line, where Unger would give the younger and smaller lineman a helping hand.
“I was a tackle and he was a guard, and he always would help me out because I had no idea what I was doing,” Te’o-Nesheim said. “He was the biggest guy on our line and sometimes he would just push me into the guy I had to block, because I was so small and skinny.”
Unger tried to convince his teammate to follow him to Oregon, but Te’o-Nesheim wasn’t as enamored with Eugene as Unger was.
“When I took my trip to Oregon, he was my host,” Te’o-Nesheim said. “He loves it here, and I don’t understand (why).”
At 6-foot-4, 245 pounds, Te’o-Nesheim is still on the small side for a defensive lineman, but makes up for any size deficiencies with a never-quit attitude.
“He just plays hard all the time,” Gunheim said. “He does everything in his power to stop a play and beat his man. That’s all you can say about him. He always plays hard and does the best that he can. Even in practice, everything we do, he does as much as he can, as hard as he can, for as long as he can. He’s just a hard worker.”
That attitude has made Te’o-Nesheim a favorite of his coaches, who say his attitude helps not just him but also those around him.
“Daniel is a favorite because he is such a hard worker, he is such an intense guy, he’s a guy that is motivated by being the best he can be and challenges other people to also stay at that level with him,” coach Tyrone Willingham said. “It’s like the fireplace. If you stand close enough to the fireplace, your pant legs get warm, and if you stand close enough to a guy like that, guess what? You get some of the same traits, some of the same habits.”
Still, not everybody is fond of the more outgoing and productive Daniel Te’o-Nesheim.
“He was a guy that was real quiet and kind of did what we asked him to do as a youngster, but he’s totally one of us now,” Reffett said with a smile. “He’s not a youngster now and he actually thinks he’s cool. He tries to boss around the youngsters. Sometimes he can get after the young guys and think that he’s the head honcho.”
So maybe he’s not the head honcho yet, but Te’o-Nesheim is certainly making people notice a once timid freshman.
Contact Herald Writer John Boyle at jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on University of Washington sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com /huskiesblog
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