I wrote on Thursday about how my initial impressions of Eric Gray’s film -- which were less than positive -- were difficult for me to reconcile with the excellent per-carry numbers he posted in several of the rushing efficiency metrics I care most about. I’ve since completed my film study on Gray, and with the dust settled and the final numbers crystallized on his resulting grades, I have more conviction in my interpretation of what I saw from him on tape and feel more confident in the narratives I can weave to make sense of that interpretation in the context of what the data says.

Because much of the necessary preamble to this article was accomplished through the publishing of Thursday’s article, I’m going to get right to it. With 97 carries charted in total, here are Gray’s final grades on both zone and gap concept runs from my film study:

I wrote on Thursday that Gray is “a decisive runner with impressive vision that makes him hypothetically well-suited to zone concepts,” and I still believe that’s true. His average vision grade on zone runs sits in a tier with Zach Charbonnet (at 0.43) right below the three 0.50+ elites in Devon Achane, DeWayne McBride, and Jahmyr Gibbs, and his decisiveness grade of 0.14 on those runs lands among a group of see-and-it-and-go specialists in Sean Tucker (0.18), Zach Evans (0.14), and Israel Abanikanda (0.13) in the top half of the class.

The main negative of Gray’s zone game is his inability (or at least his failure) to actively create space through influencing defenders at the line of scrimmage; his average manipulation grade of -0.03 is easily the worst in the class (the average is 0.04), and rather than being the result of ineffectively manipulating defenders, most of Gray’s negative grades in this area came from simply failing to manipulate defenders at all when doing so would have been optimal (if not necessary). Pressing to the line of scrimmage or feinting some direction in order to shift the leverage of defensive linemen or move linebackers out of the way is an important tool for opening up otherwise-closed lanes, but at this point, it’s not one that Gray appears comfortable implementing.

Overall, though, I believe Gray is a sound zone runner with a Neutral Rate on those carries that indicates he’s exhibiting a relatively large degree of influence on their outcomes. That feature is contrasted by Gray’s much more passive performance on gap concepts -- his Neutral Rate on those plays is higher than for any runner in this class outside of Bijan Robinson and Chase Brown. Due to the nature of gap scheme runs, that’s not necessarily a bad thing (especially for runners on teams with good offensive lines -- Oklahoma’s group ranked seventh in the country last season according to analytical methods over at Football Outsiders -- who don’t have to create a ton on their own in the backfield), and in Gray’s case, I think it’s at worst neutral:

Gray’s vision grade on gap concepts looks really bad and is a large influence on his unimpressive overall grade, but while he could probably stand to be a little bit more creative sometimes, his rate of negatively graded plays in this area (5.0%) is right in line with the class average (and is anywhere from twice to three times as good as those of backs like Israel Abanikanda, Tank Bigsby, Kendre Miller, and Tyjae Spears). He’s not adding a ton to gap plays via peripheral vision and creative decision-making, but he’s also not fucking things up by either missing or bailing on designed gaps for unadvisable opportunities at extrastructural fool’s gold.

Similarly low-impact have been Gray’s technically negative contributions in the area of decisiveness, where he has the highest rate of neutrally graded plays among backs in this class:

If the worst thing that I can say about Gray’s decision-making on gap runs is that he’s not participating in a lot of extracurricular activities or smashing the gas pedal as soon as he sees an opening, then we’re probably not doing too bad. Add in that he’s actively good in the areas of patience and tracking, and I think we start to see that Gray is a guy who knows where to be and when to be there on gap concepts, and is otherwise content to ride whatever wave his offensive line establishes for him.

While that general strategy is particularly effective on a team with excellent blocking up front (which we’ve already established was true of the Sooner offense, at least last season), I don’t think we can confidently deduce in Gray’s case that he’d necessarily be ineffective in a more volatile situation. That quality offensive line means that we don’t have a ton of evidence for Gray being able to hero-ball or create his way out of messes on gap concepts (at least in the sample of games that I charted, which were overwhelmingly from 2022), but I think the fact that he was such a sound decision-maker on zone runs speaks to two things: 1) an ability to quickly identify positive solutions to problems at the line of scrimmage, and 2) an ability to modify one’s approach based on circumstances at the line of scrimmage.

In other words, because we know from his performance on zone runs that Gray can be trusted to make quick and wise choices between multiple options, I’m more confident in projecting him as a guy who can function in a hypothetical scenario in which he’s forced to do more of the yard-creation work on gap runs than he needed to do behind the talented Oklahoma offensive line. His “issues” on gap runs were mostly sins of omission in spots where he a) didn’t actually need to do much, and b) showed he was competent through his performance on zone runs.

The other part of my film-study process involves charting physical interactions between runner and defender in order to determine a player’s ability through contact and via elusiveness, where Gray produced mixed results:

Gray is a decent outlier among other backs in this class in all three of the elusiveness categories shown here. His 53.2% Avoidance mark puts him in a tier with Tank Bigsby as the only 2023 runners with numbers in that area above even 46%, so he was attempting to make defenders miss almost comically more often than most others in this class were. His Success Rate on those evasive maneuvers was very low, however, so the success that Gray experienced as a make-you-miss guy (PFF says he forced 0.25 missed tackles per attempt, a 72nd-percentile rate) can almost completely be attributed to the spray-and-pray method he demonstrated with his signature dead leg move:

Even greater outlier status is owned by Gray’s ridiculously low mark in Contact Solidity:

Not only was the level of contact that Gray absorbed on his average collision with would-be tacklers the lowest of anyone I’ve charted so far in this class, it’s the lowest by far. That 0.35 mark represents more than two standard deviations below the class mean, while only one other player (Tiyon Evans) carries a score even 1.5 standard deviations off the average.

Much of that effect is due to Gray’s compulsion for throwing dead legs in pretty much any situation, but that compulsion itself is probably borne of self-preservation instincts given how ineffective Gray is as a through-contact tackle-breaker and pile-pusher. He’s strangely fine against defensive linemen, but the degree of success he enjoyed on physical encounters with linebackers is lower than that of the 179-pound Deuce Vaughn. Add to that a substandard mark against defensive backs and Gray is left with an aggregate mark of -0.08 against all defenders, making him one of just three runners in this class (along with Vaughn and Brown) whose average collision with a would-be tackler was more likely to end in his being brought down at the point of contact than in his gaining extra yards through that contact.

In the end, I think I view Eric Gray as a sort of off-brand Tyjae Spears. Both of them are undersized backs with more stop-start explosiveness than top speed, both of them can catch passes (Gray has seasons at two different schools with greater than an 11% Target Share, and had enough versatility to run route trees with at least 62nd-percentile Diversity in each season of his college career), and both of them produced efficiently on the ground. The big difference between the two of them -- to answer Jakob Sanderson’s question in earnest -- is that Spears’ top-shelf balance makes him much better through contact (especially out in space, where his success in shedding defensive backs was nearly twice that of Gray’s), which in turn precludes him from having to juke everything in sight in order to generate a similar level of raw elusiveness as what Gray’s dead-leg spamming produces for him. Gray is a sound decision-maker with schematic versatility who has found a running style that allows him to circumvent some of his natural disadvantages (size, strength, and speed), but I would anticipate the increased level of competition that comes with the jump to the NFL to nerf much of the effectiveness of that style and to increase the consequentiality of those disadvantages.