I started writing a Braelon Allen article back in early May, but I ended up abandoning it after writing just a couple paragraphs because I realized I didn’t really have anything to say. I hadn’t watched any Allen film yet, and while I had dedicated some significant thought to Allen’s profile last offseason, his 2022 performance was somewhat perplexing in light of his 2021 showing, a juxtaposition which made a solid, data-based evaluation difficult. Prior to prepping for this new Allen article, I’d had him at RB16 in my devy rankings, a slot far below consensus (he’s ranked at an average of 4.7 on the sites that show up on the first page of results when you google “devy rb rankings”) but truthfully meant to reflect more of a splitting-the-difference between where his freshman and sophomore numbers would each indicate he should be ranked -- perhaps I overweighted the bottom end of what I perceived to be his range of outcomes. Now, I have watched some Allen film, and my opinion of him as a player and fantasy asset has therefore changed and crystallized, and I have much more conviction in how I feel about him than I did previously. Given that, I want to focus in this piece on what I saw on film from the Wisconsin running back, but before we do that, let’s first look at the numbers that guided my initial, wishy-washy evaluation and still serve as a sort of anchoring point for my supplementary film study.

Let’s start with Allen’s freshman season, in which he ran for over 1200 yards as a 17-year old true freshman in one of the best conferences in the country, and in which his contextualized efficiency numbers were just as impressive as his raw totals and All-Conference accolades:

Note that the above percentiles ranks are relative to eventual NFL draftees, so Allen’s Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, for example, wasn’t just elite next to the numbers posted by other collegiate backs, it was elite next to the numbers posted by the very few elite collegiate runners who go on to play professionally. Basically, Allen was a monster in 2021: he faced defensive fronts that were ridiculously heavy, outperformed the collective per-carry output of the other backs at Wisconsin by nearly two yards anyway, was incredibly consistent on a per-attempt basis, broke tackles at a high rate, and dominated in the open field. There’s not much else you could hope for from a running back of any age and against any level of competition than what Allen did that year, but the fact that he did it while not yet eligible to vote and against Power Five opponents is all the more impressive.

Honestly, I had a hard time wrapping my head around how good Allen was as a freshman when I dove into his numbers last offseason, and the fact that he was so young made them feel a little too good to be true. Because of that, I said this about him on the Hero RB Show at the time: “He’s a guy I want to wait a year on. I just want to see it one more time: I want to see him repeat his productivity, repeat his efficiency on the ground -- not necessarily to the same degree that he just did as a freshman because that’s an incredibly high bar -- but just be a good player again, and then I’m fully in.”

We’ve now waited a year, and in the intervening twelve months, Allen posted another 1200-yard season in the Big Ten, essentially repeating his productivity and proving to be a “good player” once again. Still, my promise to be “fully in” in that event has been difficult to deliver on considering a stark dropoff in several rushing efficiency categories for the now-240-pound Allen from 2021 to 2022:

I want to be clear: Allen really was a good college player in 2022. Outperforming your backfield teammates by 0.36 yards per carry puts you in the 66th percentile of college runners, and producing a BAE Rating of 103.2% puts you in the 54th percentile among the same population. The problem here is that rostering good college players is not good enough in devy leagues: you need excellent college players who are likely to turn into productive NFL players, and the per-touch numbers that Allen posted as a sophomore were simply not very good relative to how eventual NFL running backs (let alone guys who go on to be productive NFL running backs) perform in college. As his Relative Success Rate and Breakaway Conversion Rate respectively indicate, Allen was still effective at both churning out positive outcomes on a down-to-down basis and at making things happen when he reached the open field, but little else about his 2022 performance -- at least from a per-carry perspective -- was very impressive, much of it was downright bad (again, from an NFL projection standpoint), and all of it was kind of confusing in light of a) volume numbers that again earned him All-Big Ten honors, and b) the ridiculous efficiency he posted in 2021. What do you do with a guy whose play-level output looks like Kenneth Walker’s one year and Karan Higdon’s the next?

Thus Allen’s RB16 ranking prior to my studying his film and subsequently writing this article. Now, I’ve watched and charted close to 70 carries of Allen’s, from three games in 2022 -- versus Ohio State, Illinois, and Purdue -- in addition to the contest against Nebraska from 2021, which saw him gain a total of 508 yards and score a combined five touchdowns while averaging 7.4 yards per carry (despite the inclusion of the Illinois game in which Allen went just 8-for-2 on the ground). Let’s look at the results of that charting process.

We’re past the paywall, so I’m just going to get right to it and explain how I got here afterwards: I was very impressed with Allen’s film and really am all in on his future as a quality NFL back and legitimate dynasty asset now.

One of the first things I noticed when initially cutting on Allen’s tape was how smooth, limber, and agile of an athlete that he manages to be at 6’2 and 235+ pounds. You hear about this 17-year old beast from Wisconsin who rips off long touchdowns and is built like a thicker Latavius Murray, and you get visions in your head of an upright, relatively stiff, runaway-train runner in the same mold as a mini-Derrick Henry or a young, well, Latavius Murray. That’s pretty much what I thought going in (and I think my perception that such an archetype is a low-probability proposition contributed to my feeling that Allen’s early dominance might have been too good to be true), but I was impressed to find that Allen is an incredibly slick mover.

Like Braelon Allen, Derrick Henry weighed 238 pounds and was a super-efficient big-play runner as a college freshman.

One metric that reflects as much is Contact Solidity: measured on a 0-to-1 scale, with 0 representing a reach attempt involving no more than two forearms, 0.5 representing a from-the-side, body-to-body tackle attempt, and 1 representing a head-on collision, the average rating that an Allen-to-defender physical encounter earned was just 0.35, tied (with Eric Gray) for the lowest mark among 22 runners (mostly from the 2023 draft class) for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of carries. That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it does make Allen unique: his mark being the lowest certainly qualifies him already, but the fact that it’s low at all is notable on its own. The population average mark is a 0.44, with a 0.55 the highest, and the top of the list is generally filled with big, physical runners -- Tiyon Evans, Bijan Robinson, Zach Charbonnet, Zach Evans, DeWayne McBride, Tank Bigsby -- while the bottom of the list is where you’ll find most smaller backs -- Deuce Vaughn, Tyjae Spears, Jahmyr Gibbs, Chase Brown, Devon Achane, Gray. Allen is the rare big man (well) below the population mean in this area, so the degree to which he’s able to avoid direct hits and minimize contact with defenders is remarkable.

Further, Allen’s success rate on attempted evasive maneuvers is 75%, which ranks seventh out of the 22 backs I’ve studied, so while he doesn’t try to make guys miss very often (he’s fourth lowest in his rate of such attempts on a per-encounter-with-defender basis), he frequently succeeds when he does try and manages to absorb relatively little contact anyway. That’s a good combination, and it indicates -- given how little he’s actually throwing a dead leg or trying to juke or spin around someone -- that Allen is reducing contact in subtle ways, which -- at least in my opinion -- speaks well to his natural athletic talent given his age and the rarity with which such a trait appears in players his size.

More evidence of Allen’s clever finesse comes via his high overall score in the tracking category. He earned a positive grade in this area on a whopping quarter of his total gap attempts in the sample of games that I watched, and the 0.23 total score he ended up with is the second-highest of any player I’ve watched, more than triple the population average of 0.07, and 0.09 higher than the next-best scorer (TreVeyon Henderson at 0.14). The only guy whose tracking grade on gap runs came out higher than Allen’s is Roschon Johnson, who is also just one of two other (in addition to Raheim Sanders) big runners who score lowly in Contact Solidity and highly in success rate of attempted evasive maneuvers. Being a big guy who moves similarly to Johnson or Sanders is a good thing, and you could make a good case that Allen is a bit freakier than either of them.

Anyway, back to the tracking thing: Allen is so good at pacing and positioning himself behind pullers and lead blockers, he scrapes tightly off the backs of his blocks while transitioning through lanes, and he navigates through the tight-quartered interiors of what are often packed boxes with deftness, flexibility, and self-control. These three plays together are a good representation of the sort of thing I’m talking about:

On the first two runs, we see Allen make a one-step transition from an east-west to a north-south track while essentially losing no speed, first as he maintains control mid-sprint while aligning himself inside a second level block, and second as he feints to the edge to draw defensive attention before exploding into an upfield crease off the same false step. The third play is just stupid: he commits hard behind his lead blocks before quickly realizing the designed gap is closed off and then identifying a backside escape route, which he reaches not by slamming on the brakes and jump-cutting towards but by bending himself around his blocks while avoiding the use of a hard cut, and thereby maintaining speed. That’s a slick maneuver to pull off for a 200-pound running back, let alone a 235-pound one.

Allen’s grades in the vision, patience, and decisiveness categories on gap runs are all above-average as well, and I’d categorize him as a comfortable, aware, and creative runner on those plays. He almost seems to anticipate extra-structural lanes. Overall, his individual grades in those various categories contribute to an aggregate score of 0.73 on gap runs that stands as the second-highest in the population (tied with Blake Corum and behind only DeWayne McBride, who did his damage against Group of Five competition). Most of Allen’s carries have come on gap concepts thus far in his career (Pro Football Focus has him at 221 gap to 191 zone overall with a 137-90 split in 2022, and I marked 48 of the 69 runs that I charted as gap), and he’s quite proficient at them (especially, I’d say, trap and power).

Allen also exhibits good vision and decisiveness on zone runs, where his grades in those areas each rank sixth among backs I’ve charted, but outside of identifying holes quickly and correctly (which, to be clear, constitutes the most important aspect of zone running), he’s fairly low-impact behind the line of scrimmage on those plays. In fact, I didn’t give him anything but a neutral grade in any of the patience, discipline, tracking, or manipulation categories on any zone run. Because of that, Allen’s overall zone score is a bit below average (0.58 compared to 0.62).

Some of that low-impact style is likely the result of Wisconsin’s dominant offensive line: running behind a unit that has ranked third and 27th in the country in run-blocking grade (according to PFF) in the last two years means relatively few problems to deal with in the backfield, and indeed, Allen owns the highest rate of neutrally-graded plays on zone runs of any runner I’ve studied. Basically, I don’t think his subpar overall grade in this area is indicative of a lack of ability, but we also shouldn’t assume that Allen would be a master zone runner in circumstances that asked more of him. Sometimes we just don’t have enough information to draw sweeping conclusions, so for now, I’ll just say that Allen is a clean decision-maker and net-positive presence on a sample of zone runs with a relatively low degree of difficulty.

Overall, I came away from my film study quite impressed with Allen’s cerebral and physical skills. On top of the flexibility and balance that I highlighted earlier, Allen also possesses the sexier attributes of speed and explosiveness. He’s a 20+ miles-per-hour guy capable of hitting home runs (his consistently high numbers in BCR attest to that), and as Bruce Feldman points out in his Freak List, Allen is a workout warrior who power cleans 406 pounds, squats 610, and runs a 10-yard split of 1.49 seconds that would match Devon Achane’s time and land in the 95th percentile among running backs at the NFL Combine. He has awesome zero-to-60 ability that allows him to take advantage of his vision and decisiveness by exploding through holes and entering the second level with a nice head of steam.

Braelon Allen’s 10-yard split is reportedly as fast as that of the 188-pound and 4.32-running Devon Achane.

When that happens, Allen is a problem to tackle, and his through-contact ability versus defensive backs ranked fifth among runners I’ve studied: he frequently broke through reach attempts and dragged full-body tacklers for extra yardage. Interestingly, however, the Wisconsin tailback was just kinda average in powering through contact from linebackers, as his 0.10 total score in that area is barely higher than the population mean of 0.09. I think some of that is due to Allen’s desire to find open space: as his high vision grades and his low mark in Contact Solidity combine to indicate, Allen is not just out here charging straight into defenders, and his success at powering through linebackers therefore suffers a bit relative to more blood-thirsty runners like Evans (both Zach and Tiyon), Charbonnet, and Kendre Miller. Allen’s size and strength help him to break tackles and gain extra yardage through contact, but he doesn’t wield those things as weapons in as ferocious a way as those other backs do.

I hope I’ve adequately explained why I’m now confident in Braelon Allen’s becoming a quality starting running back in the NFL. He’s big and fast, yes, but he’s also nimble, smart, and controlled, things that have allowed him to build the sort of production resumé that often results in high-end draft capital (Allen’s market share numbers in light of Wisconsin’s S&P+ marks through two seasons most closely align with those of backs who go on to be drafted in the second round, and early-round picks like AJ Dillon, Saquon Barkley, Jonathan Taylor, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Nick Chubb all land in his ten closest comps from a production standpoint). I realize that I’ve been pretty effusive in my praise in this article, but Allen earned negative grades on just two of the 69 plays that I watched and charted: there’s not much negative to be said! I suppose I’m not confident in explaining why his efficiency numbers fell so much last season, but a mid-October shoulder injury and a dip in offensive line performance (you’ll remember that PFF ranked the Badgers’ run-blocking unit as the third-best in 2021 but 27th in 2022) are decent culprits (along with a lesser role for the ineffective Chez Mellusi and an expanded one for the dynamic Isaac Guerrendo, at least in terms of how the performances of other Wisconsin runners might have played into a decrease in Allen’s team-relative efficiency metrics). Regardless, over two-thirds of the carries I charted were from 2022, including eight against Illinois that resulted in just two rushing yards, and Allen graded out pretty nicely anyway. You already know he’s moving up the devy ranks.