Israel Abanikanda, the ACC’s leading rusher last season (by almost 250 yards over Will Shipley), has emerged on the Twittersphere as one of the under-the-radar gems in this year’s running back class, with quality analysts singing his praises:

If Abanikanda runs sub-4.4 and weighs within five pounds of the 215 he was listed at on Pitt’s roster last year, he’ll be the only back in at least sixteen years to debut in the NFL with those credentials prior to reaching legal drinking age (Abanikanda doesn’t turn 21 until October 5th; the closest anyone’s come to fulfilling all these requirements in our post-2007 timeframe is Darren McFadden, who played his first NFL game twelve days after his 21st birthday).

If we expand our criteria to allow for a mere sub-4.5 forty from Abanikanda, he would again be the only back in at least sixteen years to debut in the NFL with those credentials prior to reaching legal drinking age. If we include runners who entered the league prior to their 22nd birthdays, Abanikanda becomes one of just 20 players since 2007. Seven of those guys were selected in the first round of the NFL Draft, another six were selected in the second round, and only three of them were selected beyond the third round.

In my opinion, it’s close to a foregone conclusion that Abanikanda will run faster than 4.50 early next month (indications of his speed almost universally point in that direction), and I’d be shocked if he’s lighter than 210 pounds. So, unless something wild happens, he will enter the league as part of a cohort of running backs that includes nearly every generational prospect to come out in recent years: Ezekiel Elliott, Saquon Barkley, Jonathan Taylor (and perhaps Bijan Robinson) all satisfied the same conditions that Abanikanda likely will have.

Given all that, the former Pitt Panther’s status as a sexy sleeper in this running back class is hard to argue with. Like Prince Phillip would likely tell you about his escapades with Aurora, however, pursuit of that archetype is not always a walk in the park -- sometimes it comes with dungeon imprisonment and battles with evil witches. In order to avoid such a fate ourselves, let’s explore Abanikanda’s profile more closely before committing to true love’s kiss.

To that end, here are his career marks in various rushing efficiency metrics:

I won’t belabor over this particular feature of Abanikanda’s analytical profile, but the relationship between his performance in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate places him highly on the Volatility Index (something that I explored more extensively in this recent article on Kendre Miller), which often indicates rushing success borne of athletic advantages that allow a runner to rip off long gains without requiring him to produce positive outcomes on a consistent basis.

That’s a play-style that often sees players have a hard time transitioning to the NFL. I think that’s intuitive: if you’re inconsistent on a down-to-down basis in college (especially given that these are largely team-relative efficiency metrics, so players are being evaluated in the context of their environments rather than through a lens of situational agnosticism), it’s likely that you haven’t fully developed the more technical and cerebral aspects of playing the position (it follows logically and anecdotally that those players who have done this possess a much higher play-level floor), and if you’re gaining a lot of yards on the relatively infrequent carries on which you do find daylight, it’s likely that you’re a better athlete than most other players on the field (how could you do so otherwise?). The threshold for being a “good” athlete is much higher in the NFL than it is in college, and the margin for mental error much thinner. So if the degree to which you dominate your competition is proportional to the degree of athletic advantage you possess over them, it follows that you’ll be less dominant against competition over which you possess less of an athletic advantage.

But I digress (and, it seems, belabor); the piece of information I really want to focus on here is Abanikanda’s missed tackles forced per attempt mark. He comes in at 0.23, in the 59th percentile, but I think this is a key part of his profile and one that the PFF number kind of miscommunicates.

PFF has been tracking MTF for college players since (as far as I can tell) 2014, but around 2018, there came a sizable shift in the numbers being charted:

That’s an important point for Abanikanda because his 59th-percentile mark in PFF’s tackle-breaking metric seems decent, but is actually sub-par relative to most guys who’ve been drafted in recent years. That 59th-percentile mark is actually in the 43rd percentile if we limit our sample to running backs in the post-2018 era, and ranks 18th out of the 22 of this year’s backs for whom I have missed tackles forced numbers for.

I say all of that to say that in addition to being a relatively boom/bust runner who lives off long gains while lacking a lot of the intangible skills required to navigate the line of scrimmage consistently, Abanikanda’s biggest issue is that he goes down rather easily. That aspect of his game is evident in properly-contextualized PFF charting, but it’s also been clear to me in studying his film.

Part of my film study process involves charting interactions between runner and defender, noting a) how solidly the back was contacted by a would-be tackler, b) whether that contact was made by a defensive lineman, a linebacker, or a defensive back, and c) whether the runner broke through the tackle attempt, was pushed back as a result of it, or something in between. By assigning numerical value to those interactions, I’m able to compare how frequently and to what extent different running backs in this class power through various levels of contact from all types of defenders.

According to that process, Abanikanda’s ability to power through contact is second-lowest among eleven backs in this class for whom I’ve charted at least 100 carries. Eric Gray, Devon Achane, and Jahmyr Gibbs all score higher than Abanikanda, who weighs 5, 30, and 15 pounds more than them, respectively.

The 185-pound Devon Achane runs with more power than does Israel Abanikanda.

Abanikanda’s success in this area does vary against different position groups: he ranks last against defensive linemen, he ranks 4th against linebackers, and he ranks 9th against defensive backs. Perhaps that seems like a strange trifecta, but I have theories: Abanikanda is a one-cut runner with top-notch burst, which enables him to get up to speed quickly and plow into linebackers. That power is just potential before he hits the gas, though, so he frequently gets taken down by defensive linemen while idling behind the line of scrimmage. In the secondary, Abanikanda’s lack of wiggle (his bag as an elusive mover is fairly limited, but he also just doesn’t attempt to make many people miss) means either finding an exploitable angle (which he’s good at) or getting taken down by a defensive back in pursuit.

In this activity of scouting prospects and projecting them to the next level, we deal with tons of good college players every year (of which Abanikanda is certainly one), and the trick is not necessarily to identify the ones who were the best in college, but to identify the ones who will most successfully convert the skillset that allowed them to succeed in college into NFL success. In that light, I believe Abanikanda’s issues (subpar skills at the line of scrimmage and deficient power) have the potential to manifest as fatal flaws at the next level, especially in tandem. His speed and explosiveness allow him to maximize opportunities when everything comes together, but more than for most other backs, Abanikanda relies on external circumstances to create those opportunities.