I know that Blake Watson and Kimani Vidal and Isaiah Davis and Dylan Laube have their respective fan clubs, but the non-Power Five rookie running back who interests me the most at this point in the pre-draft process is Frank Gore Jr. of Southern Mississippi. At 5’7 and 199 pounds, Gore is not one of the bigger guys in this class, but he looks to me like one of its better runners. His Hall of Fame pedigree is fun on its own, and it’s backed up by legitimately good numbers:

There’s a lot of green on that little table, and I want to highlight three different elements of it that I think demonstrate Gore’s appeal. First is his carry total of 759. Fewer than 20 backs in the last decade have been drafted with that amount of work on their resume (and fewer than five who are sub-200 pounds), and Gore was putting up big numbers from day one: he ran the ball a dozen times in his freshman debut, and his seasonal per-game carry loads went from 12 to 15 to 17 to 19 over the course of a four-year career in which he missed zero of 47 games. Frank Sr. was the standard of reliability for nearly two decades in the NFL, and the younger Gore has so far followed in his footsteps in that regard.

Another example of some dawg in him is Gore’s high rate of missed tackles forced per attempt. Along with Bucky Irving, Gore has a shot this offseason to become the first sub-200-pound running back in the last five years to be drafted with an MTF average above the 0.30 mark. Both last year, Tyjae Spears came in a pound too heavy and Jahmyr Gibbs missed the threshold by 0.01 missed tackles, and their caliber just reflects the exclusivity of the group we’re talking about: backs this small don’t usually score this well in Pro Football Focus’ missed tackles forced metric (especially over the course of an entire career!), and yet Gore manages to.

He was especially good in that area in 2022, when, out of 320 individual 200+ carry seasons going back to 2015, Gore’s MTF average of 0.37 ranked seventh and his yards after contact per attempt average of 4.17 ranked 19th. The only Group of Five runners who can match his marks in each category in a single season in that time-frame are 2022 DeWayne McBride and 2023 Ashton Jeanty, neither of whom are particularly close to being less than 200 pounds.

That 2022 season is really the crown jewel of Gore’s profile in general. His career numbers are nice – his combination of Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate is right there with Rasheen Ali’s as the best among the G5 backs in this class – but that junior year shows flashes of a different level of potential (color-coded based on percentile rank among collegiate backs):

Consider the context around Gore’s 2022 numbers. He:

And despite all that, Gore was – behind only McBride, Keaton Mitchell, and Spears – the fourth-most efficient small school workhorse in the country that year, becoming the only 200+ carry back in the last six seasons to average more than three yards per rush greater than his collective teammates (only six other guys in that span have averaged even two yards more than their teammates). However dominant you think of Darrell Henderson or Keaton Mitchell or Tyler Allgeier as having been at the peak of their own mid-major powers, an argument can probably be made that – especially given the context of his abysmal situation – the 2022 version of Gore was right there with them.

This focus on 2022 begs the question of what happened in those other seasons, particularly 2021 and 2023. It would be one thing if Gore suffered extreme seasonal oscillations in only his raw efficiency, but he has also posted wildly different numbers from one year to the next in terms of both team-relative efficiency and measures of success versus contact. In other words, it seems like we can’t really blame these disparate performances on external factors, a position strengthened by the fact that Gore’s situational dynamics did not change in any way that apparently explains his fluctuating efficiency. Neither the PFF run-blocking grades of his offensive lines nor the average amount of box defenders he faced on his attempts match the pattern of his yearly stats:

Gore’s offensive lines were never good, and his best individual season came when he was facing the most defensive pressure he ever would, so what gives? This article from September 18th leaves some bread crumbs, with three points about Gore’s 2023 season that I think are relevant: 1) he left that week’s Tulane game early with a foot injury and was later in a walking boot, 2) he had been “limited” in the first few games as Southern Miss attempted to “preserve him” for later in the year, and 3) head coach Will Hall said of the team’s ground-based struggles that, “I think at running back, we lost a little trust that we were gonna block it correctly. Then when we did block it correctly, we didn’t hit it correctly. We left a lot of yards out there in the run game.”

At that point, Gore had turned 30 carries into just 76 yards through three weeks, and it makes some sense to me that a running back who is being actively restrained by his coaching staff might have a hard time getting into a rhythm behind a bad offensive line, especially with opponents like Tulane and Florida State clearly overmatching them in the first month of the season. Indeed, Gore returned the next week to go 20-132-1 against Arkansas State, though he would post fewer than four yards per carry another three times the rest of the way: once against an SEC opponent in Mississippi State as well in consecutive weeks versus Old Dominion and South Alabama. Actually, however, those latter two squads were pretty stout against the run, and Gore’s per-carry output corresponded pretty cleanly all year long with the general quality of his FBS opponents’ PFF rushing defense grades:

Still, it’s true that Gore’s opponents were not collectively any tougher in 2023 than they were in 2022: generating a weighted average of opposing defenses’ PFF grades based on Gore’s per-game carry totals tells us that he faced the equivalent of the country’s 65th-best rush defense in 2023 and its 63rd-best in 2022. He faced a similarly-ranked group of defenses as a freshman, but it seems that his down sophomore numbers could be partly blamed on a gauntlet of tough defensive fronts: Southern Miss faced seven of PFF’s top-35 and three of the company’s top-10 rushing defenses that season (five of them coming in a row in the middle of the schedule), with Gore’s average carry coming against the equivalent of the nation’s 42nd-best unit versus the rush (basically like playing against LSU every week).

I didn’t begin this article with much optimism, but I think we made some progress in explaining Gore’s wildly fluctuating efficiency here. As a freshman with an offensive line as good and defensive fronts as light as they each would ever be, Gore flourished. As a sophomore with an offensive line as weak, defensive attention as focused, and a schedule as scary as they would ever be, Gore struggled. As a junior with a full year under his belt of running behind a sieve and into tough defenses, Gore excelled. As a senior with an early-season injury and no easy runway to start off the year, Gore dominated the cupcakes and was held in check by the stalwarts (it’s also perhaps relevant that Southern Miss switched from a gap-heavy rushing offense to a zone-heavy attack in 2023, so Gore was dealing with schematic changes on top of the factors listed above).

At the end of the day, the younger Gore is interesting no matter how you slice his inconsistent efficiency due to the fact that his career-end numbers fold out very nicely. He’s entering this pre-draft process with nearly 80th-percentile marks in both BAE Rating and RSR to go with elite tackle-breaking metrics and four years of workhorse-level production. He was already named MVP at the Shrine Bowl, and while I’m not sure we should expect him to dominate athletic testing, I would not be surprised to see Gore as a regular contributor in an NFL backfield before long. At least before film study, I see him as belonging to the same general archetype as other undersized but effective runners like Matt Breida and Phillip Lindsay.