What was supposed to be one last hurrah for Luc Bequette’s lengthy college football career turned out to be an East Coast pit stop. After spending 2020 with Boston College, the 6-foot-2, 290-pound defensive tackle is heading back to Cal, where he arrived seven years ago as a true freshman.
Bequette started all 11 games for the Eagles last fall, despite joining the team toward the end of training camp. He made the move to Chestnut Hill after the Pac-12 initially canceled fall sports on Aug. 11. He piled up 18 total tackles, including three TFLs and one sack. His best performance came at the end of the year when he registered a season-high six stops as well as a nine-yard sack, at Virginia.
The Little Rock, Arkansas, native also forced a pair of fumbles, first against Georgia Tech and then at Syracuse. He turned in a Pro Football Focus defensive grade of 58.2, his lowest since 2017. But, alongside fellow grad transfer Chibueze Onwuka, Bequette helped anchor a BC D-Line that improved from 11th to sixth in the ACC from 2019 to 2020 in run defense.
He wasn’t on BC’s spring roster so his absence from the Eagles isn’t news. Thanks to the NCAA’s COVID-19 blanket waiver, Bequette is allowed to return for a seventh season of college football. He was previously granted an extra year for his redshirt freshman season (2016) because he only played four games before sustaining a season-ending lower body injury that season.
He was a brick wall for Cal, especially during his last two years with the Golden Bears. In that span, Bequette totaled 99 tackles, 10.5 TFLs and eight sacks.
Cal will be getting back one of its most durable players in recent program history. From 2017-19, Bequette started 38 straight games for the Golden Bears, at the time tying two other players in the program for Cal’s active career lead in consecutive starts.