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2022 Mountain West Football Top 50: #32, San Diego State C Alama Uluave
San Diego State’s star center is the lone player at the position to crack this year’s countdown of the Mountain West’s best.
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A good center can be hard to find.
By this point, every knowledgeable college football fan knows that a quality center can go a long way towards helping an offense perform at its peak, which makes San Diego State’s Alama Uluave a unique standout among his peers headed into the 2022 season.
The only center to land on this year’s preseason countdown, Uluave first played his way onto the field as a special teams contributor before being elevated to the starting lineup on offense in 2020, starting all eight games for the Aztecs in the abbreviated COVID season. That would prove to be a prelude for what was ultimately one of the more successful individual seasons anyone had in 2021 without much notice: According to Pro Football Focus, he played 953 snaps altogether, the most of any Mountain West center, and posted a 73.4 overall grade that ranked fourth among his conference peers. Within that workload, he also allowed just six pressures (and only two sacks) in over 400 dropbacks.
The Aztecs enter this year having to replace two offensive linemen who left for the NFL ranks and Uluave will be counted on to hold the line at the point of attack. With the kind of growth he had from his first year as a starter to his second, however, he could be the kind of athlete in line for an even bigger season in his last year of eligibility.
When you see your mom in the endzone, you gotta say hi!! 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/YSoXRLhsT5
— Alama Uluave (@alama_uluave) November 8, 2021
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