For me, my top three candidates are Scottie Hazelton, Seth Wallace and Jon Heacock.
Both teams run fairly similar schemes to ND. I'd lean towards Hazelton, since he has experience running defenses on his own. Also bonus points for his Santa Claus beard.
Wallace is another great candidate on the field, but the allegations brought forward about him, insulting players' intelligence is a red flag for me. Gonna need to be something Kelly addresses and weeds out.
Heacock is also up there, because despite being a 3-3-5 guy at Iowa State, he's shown to be very flexible with his scheme to accommodate the talent he has. Plenty of experience and has fielded some damn good units at ISU, in a conference generally focused entirely on offense. The main problem with Heacock is that he has coached almost exclusively defensive backs for his entire career, and never LB's from what I've found. With Joseph and Mickens already on staff, Heacock would have to be relegated to LB's unless Joseph were to potentially go with Lea to be his DC.
My guess is that Kelly goes with one of those three or goes with a similar dynamic that he has on offense. You have Joseph and Elston as co-DC's.
I was originally firmly in the Elston to DC camp, but upon examining it, it's not ideal for your DL coach to be your DC, because that's A LOT to put on Elston. It's almost always preferable to have your DC be either LB's or DB's, because it allows them to work with coverages. Joseph could be the guy who calls plays and Elston helps run practices, but meh, I think we are better off going external here.
