Tatum Bethune doesn’t want to dwell on it or share too many of the facts, but he sees no reason to lie about it.

The veteran linebacker played through much of the 2022 season, his first at Florida State after transferring in from UCF, at less than 100%.

“I played banged up,” Bethune said Wednesday during a media availability. “I don’t want to spread too much information about that, but it was upper body and lower body.”

Although Bethune didn’t specify the injuries or when exactly they occurred, it seems clear that he was dealing with the issues for a good chunk of the season. If that is indeed the case, it didn’t affect his production whatsoever.

After Bethune amassed 108 tackles in his last season at UCF in 2021, he racked up 84 tackles in his debut season with the Seminoles, second-most on the team and the most among returning players on the 2023 squad. Bethune appeared in all 13 games, started 11 of them and was also second on the FSU defense in tackles for loss (9.5) while adding three sacks, three pass breakups and a quarterback hurry, doing a bit of everything in his first season in the middle of the Seminoles’ defense.

For Bethune, it was never a doubt he was going to be out there, even while dealing with multiple injuries stacked on top of each other.

“I stayed strong through it all. I knew I could play so I still did to help the team out,” Bethune said. “That’s all that really matters for me is the team. Personally, I’ll put the team before me. That’s really it.”

When Bethune arrived at FSU, he was seen as quite possibly a one-year transfer considering his first year at FSU was his fourth in college football and he finished the 2022 season with 269 career tackles between his two schools.

However, both Bethune and fellow linebacker Kalen DeLoach announced last December before the Seminoles’ Cheez-It Bowl victory over Oklahoma that they would be running it back at FSU for the 2023 season.

After Bethune earned an All-ACC honorable mention for his first season in Tallahassee, he has his eyes set on a larger personal goal set for his follow-up campaign.

“I’d say personally, my goal this season is to be dominant, take over the whole field,” Bethune said. “I’m still going to do my job and in the offseason, that’s what I have been working on.”

Bethune has also spent the offseason working on rounding out his game by finding and improving the weaknesses he discovered by scouring through his old film.

“What else I have been working on is using my hands to get off blocks,” Bethune said. “I watched film of myself and I caught myself a lot of times getting caught up in traffic that I didn’t need to be if I had used my hands.”

FSU enters the 2023 season with an established trio of experienced linebackers in Bethune, DeLoach and DJ Lundy. Each of the three has appeared in 30 or more games and both DeLoach and Lundy – two of the more proficient home-grown players on the FSU roster – have made tremendous strides in their development over the last few years.

However, FSU’s linebacker unit may be the most questioned on the defensive side of the ball because outside of those three, there’s little proven experience after Stephen Dix Jr. and Brendan Gant both left the program through the transfer portal.

Bethune doesn’t see any issues with FSU’s linebacker depth with preseason camp mere weeks away.

“We have a lot of young guys coming in and we also have Omar Graham, who I think is going to be amazing. A lot of people didn’t see him do a lot of things yet, but I feel like he’s going to have a huge impact in the linebacker room,” Bethune said. “We’ve got Blake (Nichelson) and Dylan (Brown-Turner) coming in, they’re catching on quick. I just feel like once we get that experience and fall camp rolls in, they get to see how everything runs and they see how we do it, we’ll all capitalize off each other.”

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