PROVO — Troy Warner walked into the main foyer of the BYU broadcasting building for football media day in June with a slight limp, found his designated name placard, and sat down.

After flipping around the placard, he stared at it for a moment, smiled, and turned it back around.

"Troy Warner, Defensive Lineman," it read.

Why not? He’s listed everywhere else on the field.

"I can't speak for the amount of times I'm listed on the roster, but the coaches know I try to be a versatile player, and I just try to be proud of the way they view me as a player," said Warner, joking that he might pop up in a game or two opposite Corbin Kaufusi at defensive end.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm playing safety. But yeah, they're listing me at a lot of positions."

After suffering an injury in the eighth game of the Cougars’ disastrous 2017 season, Warner is back with the team and ready to improve on his sophomore year at cornerback — except it won’t be at corner.

Listed as the team's starting option at three positions, Warner is planning to make a move to safety during fall camp. Which safety spot he'll play is yet to be determined — his new position coach Preston Hadley could envision the younger Warner brother at either free or strong safety — but it will be a different look than the past two seasons, where Warner grew to be one of BYU's most reliable cornerbacks in recent history.

While many of the storylines around BYU football's preseason camp revolve around the offense — like who will be the team's starting quarterback — the switch-up in the Cougars' defensive backfield may prove just as vital to the overall health of the upcoming season.

The younger brother of former BYU linebacker Fred Warner tallied 36 tackles, five pass breakups and a fumble in the first eight games of 2017 before suffering a Lisfranc fracture in the Cougars' 33-17 loss to East Carolina.

And while hadn't fully recovered from the nine-month rehabilitation process in time for media day, Warner made a vow to be back on the field by the time fall camp opens in August.

"By fall camp, I’ll be more than ready to perform at a high level," he said. "I'm looking forward to (fall camp)."

His new position coach will be glad to have him, too. Former Weber State secondary coach Preston Hadley made the move to his alma mater in the offseason, and he put a priority on the returning cornerback as one of his safeties alongside Dayan Ghanwoloku, Isaiah Armstrong and Tanner Jacobson since January.

Even if he hasn’t taken a single snap at the position, Hadley is strongly supportive of the former all-San Diego Sectional safety’s move.

"For now, he's a safety," Hadley said. "I can't say that he'll be a safety forever, but the plan is to keep him at safety and to have a good rotation of a good group."

Hadley praised Warner’s abilities in man-coverage, physical play, and adaptability within the Cougars’ defensive scheme as reasons for the move.

"Troy's a very instinctive football player," Hadley said. "He's a football junkie, and he understands the game, angles, leverage; football is all about leverage, and he just gets it. It’s a lot of stuff that you just can’t coach."

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Even as Fred Warner received rave reviews from coaches and teammates, including former Seattle Seahawks star Richard Sherman who now moonlights at cornerback for the Niners, he tried to keep his head grounded in the monotony of OTAs and training camp, which opened June 24.

In the meantime, Warner hasn’t gone far from the team. The foot injury kept him from practicing through the spring, but he attended every defensive-backfield meeting in the offseason, often arriving early, and renewed his focus on studying film in preparation for the Cougars’ 2018 opener at Pac-12 foe Arizona.

And the 6-foot-1, 200-pound junior-to-be doesn’t want to waste any time in his first season played without older brother Fred, who will be a rookie the San Francisco 49ers this fall.

"Because I'm an upperclassman, I have to take more of a load on the team and on the defense," Warner said. "I’ll hold the guys accountable, but I’ll mostly hold myself accountable around the guys.

"I just want to continue to improve, to do my part, and to help others do theirs. Leadership will be big for me."

Warner has personal goals. But mostly, he just wants to win and bring back respectability to an uncharacteristically dreadful season at BYU a year ago.

"We've been working really hard, getting extra work in to improve," he said. "We're hungry to do better than we did last year. We are really hungry to get out there and shock some people."

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