Of all the starters Mississippi State has lost from last year’s 10-win team — the playmakers, the reliable veterans and the fan favorites — no loss will loom larger this spring than the loss of former starting middle linebacker Benardrick McKinney.

The consensus top draft prospect at the position in this year’s draft class left school a year early to pursue his pro career, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of a Mississippi State defense that also lost defensive coordinator Geoff Collins to the Florida Gators.

Collins’ work with Mississippi State’s linebackers through the years was fantastic, and he played a tremendous role in helping McKinney develop into a top NFL talent. But with McKinney now gone to greener pastures and Collins no longer in place to develop his replacement, the Bulldogs are going to need someone to step up and have a huge year this fall to keep the defense clicking.

That player will likely be rising junior linebacker Beniquez Brown.

To clarify, Brown is an outside linebacker and McKinney is an inside linebacker. They started side by side last season, so Brown won’t be directly replacing McKinney at the center of the defense. Still, he can (and likely will) take on a lot of the responsibilities McKinney handled last season, like diagnosing offensive formations pre-snap and calling out adjustments to his teammates on defense.

As a sophomore and first-time starter last season, many considered Brown to have one of the best football IQs on the team. When the team was given a weekend away from football during a bye week in October, Brown admitted it was hard to simply sit and watch a game with his mom as a fan because he’s so in-tune with the mental element of the game.

“I do find myself stopping sometimes because I will sit there (at home) and tell my mom, ‘Oh they about to run this (play), mom,'” Brown told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger during that bye last fall.

His teammates also praised his intelligence and expressed how vital it was to the unit.

“I mean, I call him the smartest linebacker in the nation,” defensive end Ryan Brown said in the same C-L article. “He’ll call the zone read every time. He loves telling us when it’s pass. It’s not just run or pass, it’s specific,” teammate Ryan Brown (no relation) said. “It’ll be hook play, or the husker, or the power. It doesn’t matter. You can’t get more specific than that.”

That intelligence will pay major dividends in the fall when McKinney is working his way onto an NFL roster. Brown’s ability to understand an opposing offense as well as his own defense should keep the entire unit on the same page despite the new faces on the field and in the coach’s box. As first-time starters learn a new system under new DC Manny Diaz, Brown can help serve as a teacher and as a captain of sorts for the defense.

Not to mention he’s a pretty darn good football player who may have a pro career ahead of him as well. McKinney led Mississippi State with 72 tackles last season, the fewest by any team leader his team in the SEC, but Brown wasn’t hard behind him with 62 tackles.

While McKinney was an enormous, downhill-oriented middle linebacker, Brown is a bit more rangy, as evidenced by McKinney’s slight edge in sacks and tackles for loss, and by Brown’s pair of interceptions last year.

So to answer the question posed in the headline: Yes, Brown is ready to step up in place of McKinney. The better question is if there’s anyone else ready to step up beside him.