After an off-day on Sunday, the Buffs regrouped for their ninth practice of fall camp on Monday morning. Between Saturday afternoon — when the Buffs held their full pads first scrimmage at Folsom Field — and now, defensive coordinator Tyson Summers had a chance to revisit Saturday's session, dive into the film room, and further assess how hid defense looked.

With respect to the scrimmage and in general as fall camp progresses, Summers has seen his defense take steps in the right direction.

“The first thing that jumped out to me is what I’ve noticed, not only in the scrimmage, but through our first eight or nine practices, which is a large amount of growth and maturity from our players," he said."

In particular, Summers was pleased with how his guys were wrapping up offensive players for clean tackles.

He gave a direct shoutout to his secondary for doing a good job in the tackling department.

"One of the things that I was really excited about was how we tackled during the game," he said. "I thought we did a nice job with that. We’re really young in the secondary and we’re asking a lot of true sophomore and true freshmen to step up and play for us fast. I thought they did a nice job of tackling on the back end.”

While the Buffs return all three starters at defensive line and the ILBs corps is comprised of veterans, Colorado's secondary is easily the most inexperienced position group defensively, as Summers alluded to.

That said, the defensive backfield is by no means made up of strictly greenhorns.

Senior safety Derrion Rakestraw has emerged as the leader of that group and overall, Summers has seen him grow by leaps and bounds since a calendar year ago.

“Derrion’s been great," Summers said. "I can remember last year about this time, we were talking about depth. I knew he had played a little bit the year prior but there were a lot of question marks. He really played as solid as you can play the last five or six games for us, he really did."

"He had a lot of outstanding plays and was a big reason for our turnaround in the last few games of the season (with) his communication, his confidence and the high level of play he had."

Rakestraw himself said he's in a good spot, certainly in part to the continuity of having Summers staying on to call the plays defensively for the second straight year.

But learning from Mikial Onu in 2019 and getting some ground under him as last year progressed also aided in Rakestraw's development, setting him up nicely to be a big part of CU's defense.

“I’m pretty confident going into this season," Rakestraw said. "The experience I got last year really helped me to be able to play a lot faster and really with the whole defense — we’re trying to pick up where we left off from last season. I’m confident with the calls we’ve got and I’m confident in our coaches and everybody we’ve got on the field. I feel good.”

Rakestraw has positive reviews to hand out to a few of the Buffs' young bucks: corner Christian Gonzalez and Toren Pittman, who's been practicing under Rakestraw at free safety for the majority of his reps this camps.

“We’ve got Toren and Christian Gonzalez — they’re both doing a great job," he said. "Christian’s been running with the 1s and has been doing a lot of great things out there. Toren’s getting a lot of great time, too. He’s coming along and (coaches) are excited about him for the future — he might be out there this year, you never know."

"They’re both doing a great job — it’s actually surprised me how fast they’re coming along with it, so I’m proud of both of them.”

Last season, before the Buffaloes had a tangible and noticeable defensive renaissance vs. Stanford and Washington, the amount of points being let up on a weekly basis provides enough evidence as to extent to which CU's D was stopping opposing offenses.

A significant problem the defense dealt with was letting up big plays on a regular basis, with much of that being the result of busted coverage by the secondary.Summers referred to them as "explosive plays" and took significant action to lessen such plays from continuing to happen.

On Saturday, Summers noted that his guys looked good on that front.

"I think that we are doing a nice job, particularly in the secondary, of closing down some lanes and being able to prevent explosives," Summers said.

Rakestraw concurred from his on-field vantage point.

“Last year, a lot of it was just learning the playbook and where we needed to be at every moment," he said. "This season you can really tell the difference. Our secondary knows what to do, guys are flying around and in the scrimmage, we really didn’t have too many explosives. We really limited it so like I said, we’re carrying on where we left off from last season. We’ve got to keep that going.”

Rakestraw is Summers' lone senior within the defensive backfield. Heading into the 2020 season, Summers is confident Rakestraw will make meaningful contributions for the Buffs.

"He’s done a great job with leadership," Summers said. "He’s one of my favorite guys and having been his position coach last year, he’s special to me for a lot of different reasons. But he’s playing at a high level, communicating well and I’m really proud of everything he’s done at this point in time.”

More notes and quotes from Tyson Summers and Derrion Rakestraw are below.

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“I’m excited about the opportunity we’ve got and we have a fantastic group of young men. Between Nate (Landman) , Akil (Jones) and Jon (Van Diest) being back in year two of understanding the system — we’ve made some adjustments but we feel like those guys have a better chance of being able to make plays and being able to help us in some of the pass coverage things that we’re asking them to do. We’re looking for depth after (Landman, Jones and Van Diest)."

"We have a lot of guys in that group in Quinn Perry, Marvin Ham and Alec Pell that are back. Alec is a local kid that we moved to inside linebacker and I’m really impressed with what we got with Mister Williams. Ray Robinson is a guy that has been able to help us. He’s a guy with a lot of length that can run.”

"We are a first-year staff together, so you’ve got new guys with headsets and in the box, so that’s an experience we’ll continue to work. As I went back and watched the film, I saw a lot of guys that made great plays. You were able to see guys who were in position to make plays and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.”

"When you’ve got to run down the field with Daniel Arias, there’s not a lot of people who are running like him. It’s definitely helping us, having to cover those quick guys in the slot and then having to go and cover the long guys on the outside — it’s helping us a lot.”