I’ve been procrastinating devoting any actual thought to Eric Gray this entire offseason. I started watching film on him back in January, wasn’t particularly impressed from a subjective standpoint, realized that those impressions didn’t particularly match either the aggregate grades he was earning along the way or his career marks in the various rushing efficiency metrics I like to look at, didn’t know how to reconcile those inconsistencies, and so put his eval on the back burner. Since reading and hearing good things about Gray from people I respect in recent weeks (notably from Danny Kelly in an upcoming conversation on the BDGE YouTube channel and in Matt Waldman’s Rookie Scouting Portfolio, which is a fantastic resource for the entire 2023 rookie class across the skill position spectrum as well as for learning to evaluate players -- I bought one and so should you), though, I’ve decided it’s time to face my fears and attempt to make sense of the things that I see on-field and in the numbers in Gray’s profile.

The most approachable of the steps in that process is examining Gray’s physical and athletic profile:

Gray is one of the slowest backs in this class (SaRodorick Thompson and Tavion Thomas are the only two Combine participants with worse Flying 20s than Gray’s), but he wins with cutting ability and flamboyant dead legs on the field, and the areas of strength he revealed through athletic testing make perfect sense in the context of that running style. Gray’s 10-yard split, vertical leap, and short shuttle combine to speak well to fantastic zero-inertia and lateral explosiveness and make him one of just 18 prospects in my post-2007 database to post numbers in at least the 66th percentile in each of those three categories. Players like Jerick McKinnon, Danny Woodhead, Elijah Mitchell, Aaron Jones, and Christian McCaffrey are peppered throughout that historical list.

Accounting for size as well as performance in these various athletic tests, the following ten players are the past prospects whose physical profiles most closely resemble Gray’s:

Brian Westbrook is obviously a good name, and guys like Myles Gaskin and Andre Ellington serve as further precedent for Gray-shaped players turning into fantasy-relevant NFL backs for a couple seasons at a time, but it’s clear that we’re not looking at a no-doubt physical specimen here. Gray is very quick but also pretty small and pretty slow, making him a member of a general archetype that is not rare among fringe NFL talents.

What is rare among fringe NFL talents is the degree of success that Gray experienced as a collegiate ball-carrier:

If we acknowledge that Gray is not going to be a frequent generator of big plays -- on top of his sub-standard speed, he posted a Breakaway Conversion Rate above the 50th percentile in just one of his four college seasons -- his analytical profile speaks to competence in most other measurable aspects of running the football. He broke a decent amount of tackles, he ripped off chunk gains at a nice rate, and he produced efficiently overall while seeing relatively heavy defensive fronts and producing positive outcomes on a regular basis nonetheless. That last point refers to Gray’s RSR, which is positive but not especially impressive, though it’s also probably worth pointing out that last season saw Gray correct some consistency issues and post a near-elite RSR for the first time in his career:

Gray spent his first three seasons sharing time with Ty Chandler at Tennessee and then running behind Kennedy Brooks at Oklahoma, and he didn’t experience a ton of success as a part-time ball-carrier in either situation (despite being relatively productive in those years), but that 8.5% RSR he posted as a senior lands in the 85th percentile and was the 8th-best mark among all lead backs in the Power Five conferences last season.

Considering Gray’s rushing efficiency numbers from a year ago alongside the contextual factors that surrounded them, the following ten single-season performances are the most similar to Gray’s 2022 among all collegiate runners going back to 2018:

That’s a pretty damn good list. Najee Harris and Travis Etienne are both lead-back professional talents, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, Joshua Kelley, and Jordan Mason are NFL contributors, and guys like Raheim Sanders and Devon Achane are some of the most promising up-and-coming runners in the college ranks. Players who post the numbers that Gray posted last season are often good enough to see the field frequently at the next level.

Players who post the numbers he posted in his previous three seasons are often not good enough to see field frequently at the next level, which makes Gray an interesting evaluation even without muddying things with the confounding lack of synergy in his film. Did the Jeff Lebby offense simply suit his skillset better than the Lincoln Riley and Jim Chaney systems did? Did the 210 pounds he was listed at last season make a significant difference after having (supposedly) played between 195 and 206 previously? Did he get legitimately better after struggling early on? It’s hard to say what caused the massive improvement in rushing efficiency marks from Gray’s first three years to last season, making it difficult to calibrate the weight one should give the subpar start to his efficiency profile versus the credit he should get for smashing in his collegiate swan song. Gray “broke out” from a production standpoint when he posted 1000 yards from scrimmage and a 30.5% Dominator Rating (an 83rd-percentile mark among eventual NFL draftees) on an SEC team as a sophomore, but he didn’t really establish himself as an NFL-quality runner until he tore apart the Big 12 as a 22-year old senior.

Raheim Sanders is both my devy RB1 and one of the few college runners whose per-carry dominance rivaled Eric Gray’s last season.

I’m only halfway through my film work on Gray, but early returns are that he’s a decisive runner with impressive vision that makes him hypothetically well-suited to zone concepts, but it’s also true that (and here’s more of that confounding element to this profile) the 2019-2021 seasons in which Gray struggled all saw him handle a greater proportion of zone runs (according to both PFF and Sports Info Solutions) than he did in his excellent 2022, a feature that was especially prominent in his role at Tennessee. It is possible, though, that Gray’s impressive traits in the areas of patience and discipline on gap runs make him a better fit for those kinds of runs than he is for zone. I think it’s likely that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, as Gray looked his best to me on inside runs that allowed him to leverage both his vision and explosive first step and that included inside zone concepts as well as less rigid gap concepts like duo.

We’ll dive more into Gray’s film after I finish watching and charting him at some point this week, but I’m pleased with the conclusions I’ve drawn in the process of writing this first article after I could barely wrap my head around this guy just a week ago. Now (and for now), I’m comfortable asserting that he’s a small inside runner with good composure behind the line of scrimmage and a nasty dead leg in the open field who ran like one of the best backs in college football last season.