Kansas State redshirt sophomore DJ Giddens has been one of the most exciting running backs for me to see step into a starting role this college football season, so I wanted to take a midyear dive into his profile and more closely examine how legitimate of a prospect we should view him as being.

First, because of the meaningful signal provided to us by metrics like breakout age (though that signal is not as important for running backs as it is with wide receivers), it behooves us to question why a player a) redshirted, and b) didn’t become his school’s RB1 until his third year on campus. Fortunately in this case, Giddens has a good excuse in the form of Deuce Vaughn, who -- while lacking the size that would enable him to leverage his amateur success into proportional opportunities as a professional -- was one of the best collegiate backs in the country, really from the time he stepped onto campus and was a 1000-yards-from-scrimmage back as a freshman, but especially in the 2021 and 2022 seasons in which he was a back-to-back consensus All-America selection. Can we really fault a young player for redshirting and then playing a backup role while that guy was on the team?

Once Giddens was on the field, he smashed, even outperforming Vaughn on a per-carry basis. Despite running into (substantially) heavier defensive fronts, Giddens gained 0.40 yards per carry greater than Vaughn did while also succeeding on 23.2% more of his total attempts. It’s objectively true that Giddens was Kansas State’s most effective rusher last season despite the fact that their starting running back was an All-American, and he had the ridiculous box count-adjusted numbers to show for it:

Now with Vaughn out of the picture, Giddens has stepped into heavier volume, improved his raw efficiency, and maintained a substantial lead over the per-carry output of the other backs on the team even when we account for the fact that he’s now playing on more passing downs and thereby enjoying lighter defensive fronts than he had to deal with as a breather back:

I haven’t done any close, dedicated film study on Giddens yet, but Brandon Lejuene cut up the Wildcat runner’s 293-yard, four-touchdown performance against UCF for his YouTube channel a couple weeks ago, and Giddens seemed to have the full repertoire on display in that game. I took the liberty of further cutting up Brandon’s video for the sake of putting together the following mini-selections of specific plays I thought were notable, but make sure you subscribe to his channel. He puts out a lot of film cut-ups as well as weekly stock reports for both draft-eligible and underclassmen players.

Here’s a short compilation of the best runs I saw from Giddens in that UCF game:

At 6’1 and 212 pounds (I project based on historical weight gain patterns that he’ll measure in at 6’ ⅜” and 218 pounds during his eventual pre-draft process), Giddens is a relatively lean runner, but he seems to both minimize and shake off contact well while navigating the first levels of the defense. He’s got a mean dead leg that he uses with precise timing, but overall I’d describe him as more of a vertical slasher than a laterally elusive runner, as many of his runs are characterized first by patience, then burst while getting skinny through a crease, and then making defenders miss with aggressive feints that still allow him to keep a north/south orientation.

They have completely different body types, but some of the same things I liked about Tyjae Spears’ game last offseason seem to be present in Giddens’ skill-set. Part of that comparison exists in their shared ability to both evade and slip away from would-be tacklers: Spears forced missed tackles at a 93rd-percentile rate over the course of his college career, and with one of the top marks in that category among Power Five backs so far this season, Giddens’ career missed tackles forced per attempt rate currently lands in the 89th percentile. Another element of it is present in the impressive coordination and body control they (seem to) have in common in the passing game:

Those are just four plays from one game that currently represent nearly 20% of Giddens’ career receptions, but he’s pacing to catch only four fewer balls during Kansas State’s 12-game schedule this season than the versatile Vaughn caught in 14 games last year (38 to 42), and on a 12.4% target share that would land in the 79th percentile among career-best marks for eventual draftees. His pass-catching resume isn’t large yet, but it will be by the time he declares, and the skills he displayed in the above clips hint at legitimate three-down ability.

Each of those plays shows something different. The first sees Giddens lining up in the slot (something he’s done more often than all but seven college running backs with at least 10 targets this season), coming across the middle on a sort of angle route, and spinning behind him to catch an inaccurate throw outside the frame of his body while getting hit. That’s not normal running back stuff. The next shows him getting vertical outside the hashes, blowing by an overmatched edge defender in coverage, and again making an impressive grab outside the frame of his body while staying balanced and quickly transitioning into YAC mode. Then we see him again lined up in the slot, making a clean catch with both hands and feet at the sideline, and casually darting away from a defensive back to pick up an extra yard. Even better tightroping is seen on the next play, where Giddens catches a standard swing pass, jukes a defensive back out of perfect position to then shake off what became an arm tackle within the confines of a phonebooth, and somehow keeps his balance while staying in bounds and getting further upfield. Dude might be good.

As things stand right now (before the Texas Tech game), Giddens’ 23.7% Dominator Rating is a decent mark (it’s slightly above the 50th percentile for eventual draftees in their third collegiate seasons) that, in the context of Kansas State’s S&P+ ratings, makes his third-year production comparable to the corresponding numbers posted by past prospects like Rashaad Penny, Zach Charbonnet, and Miles Sanders. All that while the UCF game is one of just two in which he’s had over 100 yards from scrimmage this season (the other came against Southeast Missouri State in week one), and as he is clearly the best player on Kansas State’s offense but averaged just 13.3 touches over the first three weeks, I think there’s room for his opportunity and productivity to grow. I’m not positive he declares after this season, but Giddens has one of the more intriguing skill-sets among current college runners and strikes me as perhaps the most underrated draft-eligible back in the country. He’s inside the top ten of my current rankings for the 2024 draft class.