2022 Mountain West Football Top 50: #50, New Mexico S Tavian Combs
The young Lobos safety is the first player on this year’s countdown of Mountain West football’s best athletes.
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An up-and-comer ready for more.
Our annual preseason countdown of Mountain West football’s top performers begins in Albuquerque, where New Mexico safety Tavian Combs has put in a good deal of work for the Lobos over the past two seasons and might finally earn more of the recognition he deserves.
He cracked the starting lineup as a true freshman back in 2020, no easy feat under the tutelage of defensive coordinator Rocky Long, and would eventually start five games while appears in all seven Lobo contests, compiling 51 tackles, one pass breakup, and one forced fumble in a season where New Mexico had to relocate to Las Vegas for a time in order to play.
2021 proved to be another step in a productive direction for Combs, as he started all but one game and upped his game across the board. He’d finish second among Lobos defenders with 81 total tackles while breaking up five passes and snagging two interceptions from the ever-important LOBO position, posting an overall PFF grade of 70.1 that marked an improvement of nearly twenty points from the previous season and wasn’t too far off the mark of his more-heralded safety peer, Jerrick Reed II.
Expectations in the Land of Enchantment will be even higher this fall, so Combs’s contributions figure to be more crucial than ever as the Lobos strive to meet them.
ONE of None🦍🦍 pic.twitter.com/bMjC8wmN7A
— Tavo_1k (@TavianCombs) April 27, 2022
