As Memphis football prepared to face Iowa State in the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, interim defensive coordinator Jordon Hankins had a clear top priority.

"Stopping the run was No. 1. And our guys knew that," Hankins told the Commercial Appeal in an exclusive interview a day after the Tigers closed out the season with a 36-26 win Friday. "Obviously you don't want to give up passing yards, but at the end of the day, in college football, if you can stop the run, you've got a chance. And I thought our guys flew around, I thought they took shots. Even when they missed tackles, we had other people there. Stopping the run was the No. 1 thing that we had to get done."

Stopping the run figured to be a tall task against the Cyclones because running back Abu Sama III was coming off a 276-yard, three touchdown performance against Kansas State. But Friday's game would be a different story.

Hankins' defense bottled up the freshman and the Iowa State rushing attack, limiting Sama to 12 carries for four yards and holding the Cyclones to a grand total of zero rushing yards. The performance gave the Tigers a 10-win season and some real momentum heading into 2024.

The first order of business in the offseason will be picking a new defensive coordinator. Matt Barnes left for Mississippi State before the bowl game, so Hankins — who has been linebackers coach since 2021 — took over in the interim role. The Liberty Bowl results led to an outpouring of support from Tigers fans, many of whom are now lobbying for Hankins to get the permanent role.

"I love it in Memphis. I love the city," Hankins said. "Best job I've ever had. My family loves it here. And the end of the day, I'm going to do whatever's asked of me to help Memphis football win."

Hankins and the staff decided to take something of a risk in instituting a new defensive scheme against Iowa State. With only nine practices to prepare, Hankins said the goal was to give Iowa State a look they hadn't seen before, and Cyclones coach Matt Campbell said afterwards the changes played a role in the Tigers' 19-0 lead in the first quarter.

"Just give different looks," Hankins said. "That was the biggest thing. Give different looks and have the ability to bring pressures from different areas. Find as many ways as possible to show some things that we haven't shown, but also at the same time doing it extremely fast and with a lot of communication. That's really all we were trying to do. We were trying to show as many looks as possible, just moving people around and trying to keep changing the picture. And that's really what it was."

Hankins spent three seasons as the defensive coordinator at his alma mater UT Martin before joining the Tigers as linebackers coach. He decided to move from his usual position in the coaches box to the sideline against Iowa State, wanting to make sure he could directly communicate with his players to solve problems and fix things during the game.

That system led to the stat shared across social media afterwards — zero rushing yards for a team that averaged 119.9 per game this season. Memphis coach Ryan Silverfield praised Hankins after the game.

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And now Silverfield has a decision to make about his next defensive coordinator.

For his brief time in the interim role, Hankins kept it simple.

"It's not a difficult process in my eyes," Hankins said. "At the end of the day you're teachers. They have to understand why we're doing things. And I think once they saw a little success with it, it started building steam and the buy in continued to grow. But at the end of the day, I'm not just going to walk in there and say, 'OK, we're doing this,' without telling them why we're doing it and how it gave us an advantage in areas. Once they figured out the why and all that, we've got a great group of kids. I knew they were going to play hard, but we had to build the confidence in the schematics of what we were going to do."

Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @thejonahdylan.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Will Memphis football promote Jordan Hankins on how defense performed?