When the email popped into his inbox, Jordon Hankins hadn't heard of Dave Aranda.

Aranda, then the defensive coordinator at LSU, wrote to Hankins, then the defensive coordinator at UT Martin, asking to talk through Hankins' three-high safety defense. A few days later, Hankins walked into the office of Skyhawks coach Jason Simpson.

"Do you mind if I go to Baton Rouge?" he asked.

Simpson told him to go. Hankins and Aranda talked for hours.

"They stayed up till about 11 o'clock at night talking ball, 11 or 12," Simpson said. "And then Dave asked him to meet him at 6 a.m. the next morning so they could do some more."

Hankins left UT Martin in 2020, spending a year as linebackers coach at Marshall before joining the Memphis coaching staff in 2021. He spent two years as the Tigers' linebackers coach before he was elevated to defensive coordinator this season.

His defense — that three-high safety defense that Aranda, now Baylor's head coach, was so interested in — has been a revelation this season, powering the Tigers to a 6-1 overall record ahead of their game Saturday (11 a.m. CT, ESPNU) at home against Charlotte.

How Jordon Hankins built Memphis' defense

When Matt Barnes left for Mississippi State, Hankins took over as interim defensive coordinator for the AutoZone Liberty Bowl last season and immediately instituted significant changes. That had the Cyclones on their heels for the first half of the game, and it ended with Iowa State rushing for a total of zero rushing yards.

Ryan Silverfield removed the interim tag a few days later, and then Hankins had months to build his defense. He rarely talks schemes, sometimes making major changes on a week-to-week basis.

"Defense is about technique and tackling," he said before the season. "It's about leverages."

In other words, It's not about scheme — though those three high safeties are still there. Building his defense required plenty of new players, and the transfer portal brought them to Memphis. Safety AJ Watts from Louisiana-Monroe. Linebackers Elijah Herring (Tennessee) and Matt Hudson (Harvard). Cornerback Kobee Minor from Indiana. Defensive linemen Javon Denis (Georgia State) and P.J. Lucas (Indiana).

Add a few returning starters, and you've got a defense that looks radically different from the one that struggled so often last season.

"It's a pain," said Simpson, who spent plenty of time scheming against Hankins' 3-3-5 defense at UT-Martin practices. "It's very difficult to account for that middle safety in the blocking schemes."

Hankins, a former linebacker himself, makes no secrets about his affinity for the position. It certainly helped, as he worked through different ideas in the offseason, that he knew one thing for sure — his best player was going to be his middle linebacker.

Chandler Martin arrived at Memphis before the 2023 season after a year at East Tennessee State, and Hankins — then the linebackers coach — saw what he had right away.

"In the beginning, he was real hard on me. I thought he was picking on me," Martin said. "I thought I might've made a mistake coming here . . . He kind of pulled me to the side and let me know that he's going to be hard on me and expects a lot from me. And as the season went last year, he kind of leaned on me more and more."

He leaned on Martin this offseason, too — the two spent plenty of time on the phone going over ideas. The consensus? No matter what, play fast.

There's also a new identity for the defense: Darkside. Players have been wearing those shirts all offseason, and they've all got slightly different answers for what it means.

"My darkside meaning is we've always got our back against the wall," Watts said. "We're not looking for an easy way out."

A consistent theme this season from defensive players has been that they want some respect. The Tigers have long been known for offense, and that's usually meant plenty of shootouts.

This season, though, has been a bit of a shift. Though the defense struggled against Navy and North Texas, it shut down the rest of the opponents in a way the Tigers just haven't done the past few years.

There's plenty that has gone into that, including the relationship between Hankins and Martin. This is the first year of coach-to-player helmet communication, and Martin has Hankins in his ear for the entire game. He's usually giving Martin messages to pass on to other players, adding another item to the laundry list of defensive responsibilities Martin already has.

"Memphis ain't never been a defensive school," Watts said. "We've always been offense. So we're just trying to change things around."

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

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: How Jordon Hankins built Memphis football's revamped defense