The hardest player in this running back class for me to get a read on is Braelon Allen. From some angles, he looks like a guy who should be locked in as the RB1 in a deep but relatively flat group, and from others, he is maddeningly mediocre, enough to make you wonder if he will ever add up to the sum of his exciting constituent parts. Let’s dwell on the first of those perspectives before moving on to the second.

To start, Allen’s production profile is very good. We all know that he broke out with over 1300 yards from scrimmage and 12 touchdowns produced on nearly seven yards per carry as a 17-year old freshman back in 2021, and while his productivity and efficiency plateaued over the next two seasons, that standard of play was enough to generate Dominator Ratings right around the 30% mark on Power Five teams that deployed vastly different offenses from the beginning of Allen’s career to the end. He’s a young guy who is still learning the position (he was recruited as a hybrid defensive player who 247Sports’ Allen Trieu comped to Patriots linebacker Ja’Whaun Bentley), but he picked up two disparate schemes and proved dependable enough in both to produce a three-year career that – according to market share numbers and S&P+ ratings – compares closely to those of successful NFL backs like AJ Dillon, Saquon Barkley, and Devin Singletary. That’s not quite elite, but it’s as close to it as you’ll find in this year’s class.

Allen is also a beast from a physical standpoint. Other than a 26-rep showing on the bench press and an underwhelming performance in the jumping drills at the Combine, Allen hasn’t actually participated in any athletic testing this offseason, but he’s over 6’1, weighs 235 pounds, and earned consecutive placements on Bruce Feldman’s yearly Freak List of the best athletes in college football (see 2022 and 2023). The Twitter timers have clocked him at nearly 21 miles per hour on runs from both high school and college (see: 1 and 2), and he’s capable of squatting 610 pounds and power cleaning 405. We’ll talk about his quickness and lateral agility later, but the 1.49-second 10-yard split that Feldman reported speaks to a high level of explosiveness (it’s the same time guys like Kenneth Walker, De’Von Achane, and Edgerrin James posted during their own 40-yard dashes), and he’d have to be a 4.6 guy to miss Scott Barrett’s Speed Score threshold for future RB1 producers.

Allen’s rushing efficiency profile is also one of the best in this class, as he and Audric Estime are the only guys in it who are leaving school with above-average career marks in both Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate after having operated as Power Five workhorses for multiple seasons:

There are two main points that I want to make before we move on to Allen’s film, the first being a defense of his plateauing efficiency after a smash freshman season. In 2021, he handled a gap-heavy workload behind – according to Pro Football Focus – the nation’s third-best run-blocking offensive line, a situation he squeezed 6.8 yards per carry and a 52.4% raw Success Rate out of (marks that ranked second and tenth, respectively, among more than 80 Power Five runners with at least 100 attempts). The next year, the Badgers’ big boys dropped to 27th in PFF’s run-blocking rating at the same time that defenses took their box-stacking to an entirely new level against Allen: he faced an average of 7.37 men in the box that season, easily the most in the nation that year and the third-highest mark for any 200+ carry runner since 2018 (behind only AJ Dillon in 2019 and Blake Corum in 2023). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Allen’s per-carry average dropped to 5.4 while his Success Rate dropped to 46.3% (though both of those numbers were still above-median among high-volume runners in the Power Five conferences). I’ll also point out that Allen was averaging 5.8 yards and 3.3 yards after contact per attempt prior to incurring a shoulder injury in a mid-October matchup versus Purdue, after which those numbers fell to 4.6 and 2.2, respectively.

Allen produced nearly identical numbers in 2023 despite everything changing around him. His workload skewed very zone-heavy for the first time, and he went from playing with big personnel in traditional, under-center formations to almost exclusive deployment in shotgun sets with three wide receivers on the field. The defensive fronts got significantly lighter as teams were forced to respect the pass (Wisconsin’s pass rate went from 37% in 2021-22 to 51% in 2023), but another slight decline from the offensive line (they ranked 33rd in run-blocking rating last year) combined with significant schematic changes provide substantial reason for Allen’s play to have fallen off regardless. A young positional convert (especially one with the kind of size-imposed limitations on quickness and lateral maneuverability that Allen has) just isn’t the kind of guy you’d want in a shotgun-heavy rushing attack that keeps him from generating a head of steam and asks him to make a bunch of reads at the line of scrimmage.

Still, as I mentioned above, Allen’s 2023 numbers were as respectable as they had been in 2022. He again averaged 5.4 yards per carry and succeeded on 47.0% of his attempts, marks that both ranked 32nd among 83 Power Five runners with 100+ carries. He wasn’t dominant, but continuing to be a quality runner against major competition is an impressive feat when you consider the context around Allen’s development and shifting schematic responsibilities. In an offense completely different to what he’d previously operated in (and at a position he’s still learning), Allen succeeded on a higher percentage of his attempts in 2023 than did Trey Benson, Blake Corum, Ray Davis, Trevor Etienne, Ollie Gordon, Phil Mafah, Quinshon Judkins, Will Shipley, or TreVeyon Henderson (and for what it’s worth, PFF rated Benson, Corum, Etienne, and Henderson’s offensive lines as being better run-blocking units than Allen’s).

We’ll set aside the apologia for now. The second point I wanted to make in reference to Allen’s efficiency profile is about his underwhelming rate of missed tackles forced per attempt. His seasonal marks – all between 0.22 and 0.27 – were closer to good than great among collegiate backs, while his career number lands near the 20th percentile within the 2024 class (likely a more useful comparison group than the entire post-2006 database referred to in the earlier table, given the clear shift in PFF’s charting methodology that took place around 2018). This mediocrity tracks with one of the most common criticisms I see levied against Allen: that he doesn’t run with nearly as much power as you’d expect from a guy as big and strong as he is.