After two years, 25 games, and more than 2400 rushing yards at Ball State University, rising junior Carson Steele is now a UCLA Bruin, providing us with a relatively unique opportunity to project how a productive player will adapt to a significant rise in level of competition in a situation that doesn’t involve jumping to the NFL. Right now (meaning prior to writing this article), Steele occupies the RB23 spot in my devy rankings, largely on the merits of a production profile that closely matches those (through two college seasons) of NFL backs like Isiah Pacheco and Aaron Jones in combination with a rushing efficiency profile that has been stupid good, especially for an underclassman:

Everywhere but the open field -- he’s slightly below-average in Breakaway Conversion Rate -- Steele has been dominant as a ball-carrier in the MAC, averaging nearly two yards per carry greater than his Cardinal teammates despite seeing significantly heavier box counts, and his high numbers in Chunk Rate+, Relative Success Rate, and missed tackles forced per attempt indicate that he’s been all three of explosive, reliable, and hard to bring down at the Group of Five level. The only historical G5 prospect in my database who can match Steele’s to-date numbers in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and RSR is Tyler Allgeier, who rushed for over 1000 yards as a rookie in the NFL after not contributing much at BYU until he was a junior.

Further, Steele showed some three-down ability last season by catching 29 passes on a 7.7% Target Share, and his high usage on out routes (he ran them more than twice as often as a portion of his total route inventory than is standard for FBS backs nationwide) contributed to a 76th-percentile mark in Route Diversity that hints at pass-catching acumen beyond the realm of checkdowns and screens. He’s far from a sure thing, but his combination of size (he’s been listed at 6’1 and 215 pounds since he was a freshman), rushing dominance, and receiving competence is good enough that his place in my rankings as the RB14 among 2024-eligible runners seems justified. Still, the smart folks over at campus2canton.com have Steele outside their top-40 devy runners overall and outside their top-20 backs in the 2024 class alone, so I understand there may be things outside the numbers I’m looking at that show the young alligator keeper to be less than he appears on a spreadsheet.

So, here I am after having watched 54 of Steele’s carries from last season (from the Western Michigan and Toledo games in which he ran for a total of 335 yards and 4 touchdowns and which also happen to be the only two games that I could find with All-22 film), armed with subjective insights and charting data that should help us calibrate our excitement for his opportunity in a Chip Kelly-led offense that saw Zach Charbonnet gain over 3000 yards from scrimmage in the last two seasons.

Pro Football Focus says that Steele forced the second-most missed tackles and ranked 23rd in yards after contact per attempt among over 300 college backs with at least 50 carries last season, and while I definitely see that hard-charging running style on film, I was surprised that the former Mr. Football in Indiana (an award previously won by Rex Grossman, Jaylon Smith, and Terry McLaurin) did not grade out impressively in terms of through-contact success by my charting methods:

I initially thought some of that disparity was due to the way that I calculate the above metrics (using a weighted average system that wouldn’t be interesting to explain here), but it is true that Steele’s propensity to power through from-the-side tackle attempts from each of defensive linemen, linebackers, and defensive backs ranked pretty close to average among 24 backs that I’ve watched a significant amount of carries from so far, and his rate of powering through reach attempts (essentially arm-tackle attempts with no body-to-body contact) from each of those position groups ranked toward the bottom of the same population of players. Instead, I think Steele’s elusiveness -- he produced an 81.8% success rate on (a relatively limited sample of) attempted evasive maneuvers that ranks third among runners I’ve studied (behind only TreVeyon Henderson and Zach Evans) -- and ability to minimize contact -- his 0.34 mark in Contact Solidity is the lowest I’ve charted -- are big reasons why he’s able to break so many tackles even as his through-contact numbers aren’t great. Running through arm tackles is easier than running through body-to-body or head-on hits, and a greater portion of the “hits” that Steele takes are reaches than is typical for the other backs I’ve studied. Some of that might be a level of competition thing -- his athleticism advantage over G5 defenders allows him to avoid direct shots (I noticed a similar effect in Devon Achane’s game at the SEC level) -- but Steele also made an appearance on Bruce Feldman’s Freak List last offseason, so perhaps he wasn’t just a big, athletic fish in a small MAC pond.

(I also don’t want to give the impression that Steele is not a powerful runner. Even in the two games I watched there were several instances -- a few of them in the video below -- of him stringing together multiple broken tackles in a single play, allowing him to create long runs out of the messes he’d create at the first levels of the defense. I stand by the results of my charting and recognize the validity of PFF’s through-contact metrics, they’re just different processes that measure similar things in slightly different ways).

Outside of his interactions with defenders, I was mostly impressed with Steele’s cerebral skills as a runner, with one caveat that we’ll get to in a second. First, though, he graded out quite well as a zone runner. Despite a run-blocking unit that PFF rated as the 86th-best in the country (and as just ninth out of twelve teams in the MAC), Steele was a pretty clean decision-maker on those plays, with aggregate marks in vision, patience, tracking, and decisiveness that all landed above the population average among runners I’ve charted. His decisiveness in particular was excellent on the 32 zone runs I watched, with a 0.16 score that ranks sixth out of 24 studied backs. He quickly assesses the line of scrimmage and explosively commits to open lanes, and deftly navigates through often messy trenches on his way there, producing the population’s seventh-highest tracking grade by scraping tightly against blocks during transitionary cuts and pressing to the line of scrimmage as a means of creating advantageous angles.

Back to the caveat I mentioned above: Steele didn’t grade out impressively on gap runs. His decision-making on those plays was more erratic, as he sometimes seemed hesitant and at others saw his aggressiveness get the better of him, and it resulted in his earning the fifth-highest rate of negatively graded plays along with the third-lowest composite score among backs I’ve studied. His tracking wasn’t as clean here, and his active vision was misapplied on multiple duo runs on which he either misread bang/bounce or committed to an ancillary path that turned out not to be viable. I don’t want to draw sweeping conclusions on the basis of just under two dozen rushing attempts, and Steele was mostly fine on counter, power, and iso runs that required him to simply follow pullers or a lead blocker to a designed gap, but his performance on duo was all over the place.

That may turn out to not be a big deal, but UCLA runs more gap concepts than Ball State does, and nearly half of the 51 gap runs that I charted while studying Zach Charbonnet this spring came on duo concepts (where, for whatever it’s worth, he graded out significantly better than Steele did here. Steele’s lesser performance on gap runs is borne out in the on-field results as well, as while he averaged 5.28 yards per carry on zone runs to 5.40 on gap runs in 2022, his Yards per Carry+ on zone was 2.24, more than double the rate at which he outperformed his teammates on gap concepts, a mark of 1.05. With Charbonnet having executed gap concepts on 46.9% of his carries a year ago compared to Steele’s rate of just 35.5% at Ball State (according to PFF), there’s a chance that the transfer is not as suited to the Bruins’ system as he was to the zone-heavy scheme he leaves behind.

This is one I’ll want to check in on during the 2023 season -- maybe Steele’s struggles become a non-issue behind a better offensive line (UCLA was fourth in the country in PFF’s run-blocking grade last season), maybe Kelly modifies the system to incorporate more of the inside and split zone concepts that Steele excels on, or maybe Steele continues to make erratic decisions on duo runs. For now, though, I’m keeping the Bruins’ new RB1 right where he’s been in my rankings, as I believe he possesses the physical characteristics to get some NFL buzz after what should be a productive season in a high-octane offense.