Much of the parallels being drawn between these two players certainly make sense from a superficial standpoint. At a very basic level, Gibbs and Kamara look like each other on the field: full-length turf tape up the back of the arms, hair dangling out of the helmet, similar gaits; knees and elbows tight to the body, head slightly ducked, eyes scanning the horizon, seemingly unaffiliated with (and, having ascended to a higher plane, almost uninterested in) the here and the now of the rest of the body, with muscles all somehow appearing explosively taut and carelessly unengaged at once, and quick, choppy steps in a relaxed and efficient mechanical process somewhere between those of Shaggy Rogers and Sonny from iRobot. Each of them moves with the casual arrogance of Vladimir Nabokov’s prose, their alien capabilities breaking from fundamentality due not to a shortage of technical soundness, but to the conflict between mastery and the already-solved game that bores it. Inventiveness abounds there, and art is often its result.

Perhaps the most consequential physical difference between the two backs (and one that is not as visually obvious as the numerical disparity belies) is in their literal size. While Gibbs has been listed at 5’11 and 200 pounds since he was a freshman, Kamara came into the league at 5’10 and 214 pounds after being listed at no less than 207 pounds since the 2014 season that he spent at Hutchinson Community College in his second year out of high school.

Given historical weight gain patterns for eventual NFL runners, I project that Gibbs will measure in at 5’9 ½ and 207 pounds at the Combine, a bump up from his college listed weight that would have him enter the league with 30th-percentile size (though also with a more tenable BMI, in the 53rd percentile). Such measurements would make Gibbs similarly built to current pro backs like Aaron Jones, Chase Edmonds, and Duke Johnson. If he is truly the 5’11 and 200 pounds that Alabama lists on their roster, however, his weight and BMI would put him more in line with slimmer prospects from the past like Jamaal Charles, Raheem Mostert, and Denard Robinson.

At 5'11 and 200 pounds, Jamaal Charles was of Gibbs-ian stature at his combine

Either way, Gibbs is not similarly built to Kamara, who boasts 50th-percentile weight and is proportionally much more of a prototype NFL lead back, similar to guys like Breece Hall, David Johnson, and runners in this 2023 class like Charbonnet and Zach Evans. Given the deference that bigger backs receive in the doling out of work in NFL backfields, it should come as no surprise that the classically-built Kamara has commanded large touch totals throughout his pro career (despite being stylistically similar to many undersized backs). In the context of size alone (whether at 200 or 207 pounds), such workloads fall under the category of aspiration for a guy like Gibbs.

The place where Gibbs and Kamara undeniably resemble each other from a practical perspective is in their respective abilities to contribute in the passing game. From a bird’s eye view: Kamara entered the league after earning a 16.8% target share and catching 3.1 passes per game during his two seasons at Tennessee (marks in the 94th and 95th percentiles, respectively), while Gibbs leaves the college ranks with a career-best target share of 15.8% (from his freshman season at Georgia Tech) and after averaging 3.3 receptions per game over his three seasons (92nd and 98th).

Even from a more focused view, the receiving skillset similarities persist. In each of his three college seasons (and so at two different programs), Gibbs has enjoyed varied and creative usage as a route-runner, with marks in Route Diversity consistently above the 80th percentile (relative to all college backs with at least five targets in a season in the last five years). While college backs as a whole have “advanced” route types (those that attack the defense downfield, including wheel, angle, and out routes) make up 16.5% of their total routes run, those routes’ collective share of Gibbs’ tree never dipped below 24.9%, and his specialties have been the wheel and angle routes. While at Georgia Tech, Gibbs ran wheel routes more than twice as often as the average college running back does, and was targeted at least 8.1% more often on those routes than would be expected (given nation-wide targets per route run data) in every season of his career. His usage on angle routes was even more extreme, as he ran them more than seven times more often than the average college back does throughout his career, and was targeted on those routes more than twice as often as would be expected during his time at Georgia Tech (and despite a talented quarterback who could push the ball downfield and scramble for yardage in Bryce Young at Alabama, Gibbs was still targeted on angle routes more often than the nation-wide average as a member of the Rolling Tide).

I don’t have route data for Kamara’s time at Tennessee, but we do know that he and Gibbs were moved around the formation at nearly identical rates as collegians. During Gibbs’ amateur career, he lined up in the slot or out wide on 14.3% of pass snaps, while Kamara did the same on 14.2%. We also know that Kamara came into the NFL and was immediately one of the most dynamic pass-catching backs in the league, with 97th-percentile Route Diversity as a rookie that included a go-to grab-bag of out, dig, wheel, and slant routes.

As deep as Gibbs’ pass-catching parallels to Kamara go, I don’t think they are particularly unique to Gibbs. Many of the recent prospects that we’ve collectively convinced ourselves could be “the next Kamara” didn’t actually have skill-sets that resembled Kamara’s much at all (most notably, Etienne didn’t cross the 35th-percentile threshold in Route Diversity until he was a senior at Clemson, and even then he was still largely a screen-pass specialist, with 52.5% of his targets that season coming on such plays despite screens making up just 29.2% of total running back targets across the country), but guys like Tyler Badie, Keaontay Ingram, the aforementioned Rachaad White, Kenneth Gainwell, James Cook, and even others in this 2023 rookie class like Deuce Vaughn, Kenny McIntosh, and Bijan Robinson, have all left the college ranks with sizable receptions totals and creative, Kamara-like passing-game usage that included varied route trees and frequent movement around the offensive formation. Every year, players such as Tyler Goodson, Raheem Blackshear, Jonathan Ward, and Jerrion Ealy go undrafted after boasting most (if not all) of these features in their profiles.

Rachaad White was getting his own Alvin Kamara comps during last year's pre-Draft process

Discerning readers will have noted that part of what makes Kamara such a unique weapon is the fact that he squeezes those satellite back traits into a workhorse-sized body, the sort of vehicle that is typically reserved for plodders and two-down grinders. No doubt this is true, which further calls into question the validity of the Gibbs comparison. At 200 (or 207, etc.) pounds, why does Gibbs qualify for Kamara comps when Badie, Gainwell, Goodson, and Cook did not, despite the four of them all sporting similarly-undersized frames between 197 and 204 pounds?

Further, Kamara's workhorse body is accompanied by workhorse skills. Take away Kamara’s receiving talents and he’d still be an above-average NFL running back by his ability to run the ball alone, something that the Goodsons and Cooks of the world simply cannot say. I’d argue that Gibbs is in the same boat here as those other guys.

To that point, Gibbs has a reputation as a quality runner of the football, but his on-field results in that department tell quite a different story (I also sense that the usual pre-Draft picking of nits has resulted in the weakening of that reputation). While Kamara entered the NFL after having averaged 0.94 yards per carry greater than what the 4-star teammates he played with at Tennessee collectively produced (a 67th-percentile disparity against an 88th-percentile group of backfield mates), Gibbs finishes his college career having bested his 3.47-star teammates by just 0.34 yards per carry (numbers in the 62nd and 41st percentiles, respectively). I don’t have box count-centric numbers for players whose college careers ended as long ago as Kamara’s did, but Gibbs’ career marks in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate land in the 19th and 18th percentiles, respectively. At no point in Gibbs’ college career did he post a BAE Rating that even sniffed the average for eventual NFL draftees, as the high-water mark of 109.9% that he posted as a sophomore is in the 26th-percentile.

My film study has also revealed key differences in the skill-sets of these two players as ball-carriers (whether on a rushing attempt or after a reception). Part of my 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. I also chart the rate at which runners attempt evasive maneuvers (including dead legs, jump cuts, spins, etc.) relative to how often and how solidly they are contacted by defenders, as well as the individual and collective rates of success of those attempted moves.

Based on the results of that charting process from seven games watched of junior-year Gibbs and five games watched of junior-year Kamara, several things are clear to me. First, despite making attempts to evade defenders appreciably less often than Gibbs did (on 35.4% of his interactions with defenders, versus 43.4% for Gibbs), Kamara absorbed contact from defenders that was slightly more glancing than the hits Gibbs took. On a 0-to-1 scale where a score of 0.00 indicates that the average collision with a defender was a reaching tackle attempt (using no more than one forearm or two hands), and where a score of 1.00 indicates that the average collision with a defender was direct, head-on contact, Kamara’s average collision comes in at 0.39 (0.50 would indicate that the average collision was body-to-body contact from somewhere other than head-on). On the same scale, Gibbs’ average collision comes in at 0.41.

Second, on body-to-body collisions from the side against both linebackers and defensive backs (the type of collision that made up 66% and 58%, respectively, of Gibbs’ physical encounters with those positions), Gibbs was far less successful at breaking through tackle attempts than was Kamara. On the following scale:

Gibbs produced a score of -0.41 against linebackers to go with a score of -0.16 against defensive backs, compared to positive scores of 0.36 and 0.09, respectively, for Kamara. Those differences are stark: Gibbs’ performance versus linebackers is the second-lowest among backs in the 2023 class that I’ve charted around 100 runs for, while Kamara’s score in the same category would easily be the highest (with Zach Charbonnet a distant second, at 0.12).

These numbers are evidentiary of what I believe is the most significant difference between Gibbs and Kamara: the latter has what could non-hyperbolically be called generational talent in the area of contact balance, while the former is probably below average in that area (this is a new charting process, but early returns for Gibbs relative to other 2023 backs don’t look great there). Despite making use of relatively few evasive maneuvers, Kamara is able to subtly contort his body using micro-movements that lessen the solidity of and power behind shots taken from defenders, and his cat-like balance and coordination allow him to absorb whatever contact remains and continue on his way. Tackling him must be like trying to tackle one of those inflatable tube men that flop around out in front of car dealerships.

Gibbs has his own style of making things work, particularly in the open field, where his deep bag of moves allows him to evade defenders at the second-highest rate among 2023 backs I’ve watched so far, but that style is decidedly not Kamara-like (despite movement styles and superficialities that are otherwise pretty similar). Surely in large part due to his lack of size, Gibbs is simply more of a finesse player than Kamara ever has been.

What, then, does discarding the Kamara comp mean for how we should feel about Gibbs’ NFL potential, and who, if not Kamara, is the most appropriate Gibbs comp? An exploration of the second question probably helps us answer the first.

To start, we’re not going to find a fitting Gibbs comp that feels as good as the Kamara comp. Gibbs looks and moves like Kamara, and while we could find other smooth-movers with long hair and turf tape (maybe Gibbs is Edgerrin James!?), they’ll probably be even less like Gibbs than Kamara is considering that what we should actually be concerned with is finding historical precedent for the type of player that Gibbs is supposed to be. Widening our scope to players who don’t simply give Gibbs vibes will allow us to hone in on guys who impact the game in a similar way as he, though they probably won’t pass the “wow if you squint you can barely tell the difference between these two guys” test in the way that Kamara undeniably does.

Any true comp for Gibbs needs to satisfy some broad criteria:

I don’t think it’s too strict to say that any player who does not satisfy all of the above criteria is simply not a good parallel for Gibbs (at least in a comprehensive sense, it’s possible for someone to be a good athletic comp for Gibbs while not matching his skillset, or vice versa, etc.). In my estimation, players who do (though this is certainly not a comprehensive list given the long history of the NFL) are the following:

Assumptions about Gibbs’ specialness in space (though I don’t necessarily disagree with them) are doing a lot of work in filtering for these comps, but if we’re taking for granted that Gibbs is a great player with questions only about how a guy like him might be used in the NFL (rather than about whether or not a guy like him can be good in the NFL), then this is the caliber of player that it makes sense to compare him to. If we take a more reserved approach to the conclusions we allow ourselves to draw from what looks like special ability out in space, then guys like Cook, Badie, and Goodson qualify, as do older prospects like Chris Thompson and Nyheim Hines. For now, let’s acknowledge that Hines is a good player who does exist somewhere in the bottom half of Gibbs’ range of outcomes while also keeping our optimism hats on in order to examine the truly elite players that Gibbs might evoke.

In that world, I believe the cleanest Gibbs comp is Bush. Faulk and McCaffrey share many of Gibbs’ traits in a general sense, but they both left college with multiple 250+ carry seasons on their resumés. Considering that dubious ability to handle a heavy between-the-tackles workload is the biggest uncertainty in Gibbs’ profile, two players who had already proven such an ability are probably not the best points of comparison (to be clear, my questions regarding Gibbs’ ability to “handle” a workload are skillset-related, not size-related, though evaluating him as a fantasy asset also means taking into account that NFL coaches might have size-related concerns in that area).

On the other hand, Bush’s college career nearly mirrors Gibbs’ from a workload-handling perspective: Gibbs carried the ball 89 times as a freshman to Bush’s 90, they both carried the ball exactly 143 times as sophomores, and while Bush saw an expanded role as a junior, Gibbs ended his career with per-game averages in rushing attempts (12.4) and receptions (3.3) that beat Bush’s (11.1 and 2.4, respectively).

The two of them are also similar by our other criteria. Bush came into the league at just under 5’11 and 201 pounds, nearly identical to what Gibbs has been listed at. Just as Gibbs often gets moved around the formation and runs routes downfield, Bush was widely lauded as having wide receiver skills in the lead-up to his Draft. Gibbs was clocked at 22.8 miles per hour (which would be the fastest ball-carrier speed among all NFL players in the last two seasons) on the below long touchdown run against Arkansas, and Bush ran 4.37 in the forty-yard dash (a 97th-percentile time) at USC’s Pro Day back in 2006.

The final criteria -- special ability out in space -- is one that Bush certainly satisfies, though (as I mentioned would likely be the case for any otherwise-fitting Gibbs comp) not in a way that is particularly Gibbs-ian. While both of them are fast, slippery, quick, and imaginative in the open field, Bush’s game always exuded a level of exuberant showmanship that Gibbs’ does not. Bush was a folk hero, a Johnny Appleseed of broken ankles and discarded jock straps whose full-field displays of sparkling athleticism held an air of manifest destiny; it was as if Bush took it as a personal challenge -- an indulgent side quest -- to abandon structure and reverse course in the backfield, or to field that punt at the eight-yard line and nearly out of bounds, and then make as many people look as stupid as possible on the way to (and this was a given) taking the ball way over there. That such opportunities arose within the context of some officially-governed game was almost beside the point, or perhaps simply convenient; Bush was part queen chess piece and part performer, seemingly dancing and darting across the field as much for applause as for accomplishing some strategic aim.

Though similarly effective, Gibbs is a much more insular -- quietly snobbish, even -- runner than Bush was. Bush ran flamboyantly, frequently taking flight, effusively feinting one way before dashing the other, and throwing lightning quick dead legs far outside the frame of his body. Gibbs is less demonstrative, preferring instead to shield himself from the world and take the shortest route from here to there, his tightly coiled frame allowing only the quickest and most necessary gesticulation of the limbs, leaving defenders not grasping at air but slipping, somehow, off a suddenly-dipped shoulder or strangely-swung hip. Where Bush threw his body around the field, Gibbs seems to move within himself. If Bush was Big L, Gibbs is MF Doom.

Given all that, what does a Bush comp mean for how we should think about Gibbs’ NFL potential? For one, I think it should be encouraging; Bush put up three straight RB1-level seasons (by PPR points per game) to start his career despite never scoring more than eight touchdowns or averaging more than 13 carries per game or 3.8 yards per carry in any of those seasons -- he was able to be an elite fantasy producer without being especially effective or involved as a rusher or punching in a lot of touchdowns.

I believe that is also the likeliest path to success for Gibbs at the next level. While I think he has the cerebral ability to run between the tackles, his size, lack of power, and skittishness combine to make him a sub-par runner in that area. Like Bush, though, Gibbs should do well in a role that has him schemed into space, handed the ball in longer down-and-distance situations against lighter defensive fronts, and especially let loose in the downfield passing game. With Nyheim Hines-style unpredictable utility as a two-minute drill check-down funnel as his floor and 100-reception, positive-aDOT seasons as his ceiling, Gibbs is one of only a few backs who has a chance to have produced like this class’ RB1 in three-year’s time. He’s not Alvin Kamara, and he therefore doesn’t have the same workhorse escape hatch that has allowed Kamara to continue putting up RB1-level numbers without enjoying high-end receiving usage in the post-Drew Brees era. There’s more risk involved in the Gibbs profile without that extra contingency (especially at the cost that investing in him will apparently require), but it’s possible that he’s good enough to not need it.