Penn State Football Transfer Round-Up: DE Arnold Ebiketie
We're continuing a detailed look at the new arrivals within the Penn State football program in the coming days and weeks, which includes six transfers and another eight high school prospects being welcomed into the Nittany Lion family. With winter workouts beginning last week and the transfers and early enrollees already on campus and working with the program, we first touched on graduate transfer running back John Lovett out of Baylor, then corner John Dixon from South Carolina, and most recently defensive tackle Derrick Tangelo, a fifth-year senior transfer coming from Duke.
Today, we'll turn our attention to Temple defensive end Arnold Ebiketie, who joins the Nittany Lions after four years with the Owls. What type of players is Penn State getting?
We checked in with OwlScoop.com publisher John DiCarlo to learn more about Ebiketie as his career at Penn State begins:
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Shaka Toney is spending this week in Mobile, Ala., preparing for the Senior Bowl. Jayson Oweh is also in full-on preparation for an NFL career.
The absence of both defensive ends ahead of the Nittany Lions’ 2021 season is, at least in part, why Arnold Ebiketie is now spending his time in State College, Pa.
Announcing his decision via Twitter post on New Year’s Eve, the four-year Temple product decided to finish out his collegiate career with the Nittany Lions. And, given the flashes of potential shown through the Owls’ 2019 and 2020 seasons, according to DiCarlo, that finish is likely to be short-lived.
“If you could project his numbers out over 12 games and he has a good season in the Big Ten next year, I think he'll be playing at Penn State for one season,” DiCarlo explained. “He is not the type of kid who is super egotistical, and I don't know that he would necessarily articulate that when you guys talk to him. I don't think he would be the type of player to say, ‘I only think I'm gonna be here for one year.’
“But he's got a great story where if you talked to him four or five years ago, he only started playing football in 10th grade. So, he's not the type of kid who was born on camera, who grew up his whole life thinking that he was a future NFL defensive end. But I think other people have said, ‘You’re really good. You keep working at this, you've got a future.’”
That work began in earnest at Albert Einstein High in Kensington, Md., in which he was a co-Defensive Player of the Year and was named Washington Post All-Metro honorable mention. Scouted by Matt Rhule’s staff and offered as something of a “raw, athletic, ‘let’s see if we can sculpt this guy and coach him into something better’ type of recruit,” Ebiketie was a scout team player under Geoff Collins as a true freshman in 2017 and played sparingly as a redshirt in 2018.
Building from a framework of 6-foot-4, 210 pounds upon arriving on North Broad, though, Ebiketie gradually put on weight, performed well academically (and has already graduated), and came along behind end Quincy Roche. Able to flash with 13 tackles, 2 TFL, and a pair of sacks in 12 games in 2019, the transfer of Roche to Miami via the portal ahead of the 2020 season opened the door for Ebiketie’s bigger breakout in this past year’s COVID-19-shortened season.
“When Quincy Roche hit the portal last year and landed at Miami, I said, ‘So who's next in line to replace you? Arnold was the first guy he brought up,” DiCarlo said. “And now you look at his numbers, you look at what he did, just in six games, and you look at the fact that he was playing on a defense where teams could afford to key in on him because they had injuries all over the place, and he gets eight and a half TFLs, four sacks in just six games. I think he was on the track that Quincy Roche was on, just getting better and getting better.”
While Roche is preparing for an NFL career himself, Ebiketie will bring his budding talents to a Penn State defensive end spot with an opportunity to immediately step into a starting role opposite Adisa Isaac.
Strong at rushing the passer, racking up four sacks with 14 quarterback hurries and 22 total pressures, good enough to be rated by Pro Football Focus College as the fifth-best edge rusher in the AAC this past season, Ebiketie is also said by DiCarlo to be solid against the run with an ability to recover quickly due to his considerable athleticism and on-field awareness.
The story of a player who has become something of a calling card of the Temple football program, Ebiketie now has an opportunity to take yet another step on a bigger stage in the season ahead.
“He's another guy that they just developed and they liked him,” DiCarlo said. “I think they liked him at a camp, saw the ability, saw the approach, the intellect and just, when you hear of a developmental prospect, he's it.”
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