In recent years, if you’re a starting -- or even rotational -- running back at the University of Alabama, you’ve pretty much been guaranteed a similar role upon your matriculation to the NFL. Jahmyr Gibbs was just taken in the first round and will at worst be a passing-downs back this year for the Lions, Brian Robinson led the Commanders in carries last season despite getting shot in August and playing alongside a guy who had just posted a 1000-yard season, Najee Harris has touched the ball more than 300 times in both of his seasons with the Steelers, and we know that the former Tide duo of Josh Jacobs and Damien Harris have both led pro backfields after going two rounds apart in the 2019 draft. Bo Scarbrough didn’t do much in the league, but he is also the only Alabama runner to go on day three -- let alone the seventh round -- since Kenneth Darby in 2007. Before him, we had a run of six backs -- Derrick Henry, Kenyan Drake, TJ Yeldon, Eddie Lacy, Trent Richardson, and Mark Ingram -- who all became lead NFL runners.

It’s not the case that literally every Alabama running back becomes a fantasy relevant NFL player, but it is the case that in the Nick Saban era, literally every Alabama running back who has touched the ball at least 100 times in one of his final two college seasons has gone on to be drafted, with only two of them falling below the third round and just three of them (Scarbrough, Glen Coffee, and Darby) failing to make legitimate noise as pros. Jase McClellan crossed the 100-touch threshold as a junior last season and is the top returning player in an Alabama backfield that has fewer career carries among the other guys combined than McClellan has on his own. If McClellan can put together a quality senior season -- and his current ranking and average draft position of RB14 and RB18, respectively, in seasonal college fantasy over at campus2canton.com indicate that he’s expected to do so -- he could join the ranks of guys like Robinson, Najee Harris, Jacobs, and Lacy who leveraged their ascension of the Tide depth chart as upperclassman into lead back roles as NFL rookies.

Let’s explore the possibility of that happening, first informed by the rushing efficiency profile that McClellan has put together so far in his college career, and afterwards aided by the insights gained from my film study and charting of 60 carries from six games in McClellan’s last two seasons:

McClellan’s best single-season efficiency line thus far is the 175.3% Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and 4.0% Relative Success Rate (marks in the 99th and 58th percentiles, respectively, among historical NFL prospects) he posted relative to a backfield of 4.72-star teammates in 2020, but since that 23-carry freshman campaign, he’s basically duplicated the efficiency of backfields led by Robinson and then Gibbs while falling far below their collective contributions in terms of carry-to-carry consistency. In the 2021 running back room led by a classic inside grinder in Robinson, that meant a -14.5% RSR that ranks in the 8th percentile among all college runners in the last five years and is easily lower than the career mark of every back drafted in that time-frame, and even in the 2022 room led by the much more volatile and space-oriented Gibbs -- who came to Alabama on the heels of a -4.5% RSR from his final season at Georgia Tech and then produced a mark of -7.8% as the Tide’s lead runner (which would land in the 11th and 4th percentiles, respectively, among NFL draftees’ career marks) -- McClellan generated positive outcomes at a lower rate on his carries than did the collective other backs on the team.

It’s worth wondering, then, what it is that McClellan is supposed to be hanging his hat on as an NFL prospect. He’s got decent size at 5’11 and 212 pounds (and historical weight gain patterns indicate that he’s likely to measure in at 5’10 ⅜ and 214 pounds at his eventual combine) and career marks of 9.7 in yards per target and 89.3% in catch rate (both above the 85th percentile) suggest that he might offer some value in the receiving game despite having just 25 receptions to his name, but those are indications of baseline competency, not meal-ticket professional traits. I once wrote that “when NFL scouts and GMs go to the create-a-player screen, the default sliders are calibrated to spit out a running back that looks a lot like Damien Harris,” and while the two are slightly different players, I think that analogy works for McClellan as well. Some evidence exists to suggest that he’s a better athlete than Harris tested as (though Harris’ 23rd-percentile 10-yard split subdued his overall 40-yard dash time during a run in which he covered the last 20 yards just as fast as Dalvin Cook, Tony Pollard, and CJ Spiller did), and the 87th-percentile Route Diversity that he posted while earning targets at a 67th-percentile RATE in 2021 serve as further hints of his hypothetical receiving talents, but that’s what a lot of McClellan’s profile is right now: hints.

More of those were found in the six games that I watched and charted of McClellan. Subjectively, I thought he was a high runner with a one-cut and no-nonsense style in addition to some subtle fluidity in his movements that gives him some sneaky elusiveness, and the charting backed that up. McClellan doesn’t attempt to make many guys miss, but he minimized contact well and was frequently successful when he did throw someone a dead leg or a crossover move; his success rate on attempted evasive maneuvers was 75%, a top-ten mark among the nearly 30 runners for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of carries, and his Contact Solidity was the fifth-lowest among that population.

As a power runner, McClellan graded out fairly average. Pro Football Focus has him at an 89th-percentile rate of 0.30 missed tackles forced per attempt, but defensive linemen were the only group against which I found he ran through contact at a level notably above the mean:

Still, being slightly better than the population average is pretty good, and I certainly wouldn’t say that McClellan is not a tough player who finishes runs and works hard for extra yardage:

As a decision-maker, it was pretty much night and day for McClellan on gap and zone runs. On the former, he earned the third-lowest grade of any back I’ve watched (ahead of only Raheim Sanders and NIck Singleton) while also producing the sixth-highest rate of negatively-graded plays. He was simply a mistake-prone runner on the gap plays that I watched, particularly in the areas of decisiveness and tracking. This play where McClellan carelessly overruns his pullers and gives a defensive back a free tackle opportunity is a good example of the latter, and decisiveness was a struggle for him on zone as well as gap concepts. Perhaps ironic in their similarity to the issues that I noticed his teammate Gibbs experience in the same area, McClellan often hesitated upon committing to a lane that wasn’t completely clean, a tendency that cost him yardage on multiple occasions.

Other than that, though, McClellan graded out as a solid zone runner. His 0.64 composite grade sits just above the average of 0.63, and the rate at which the Tide back earned negative grades on zone runs was bottom-ten among backs I’ve charted. Perhaps partially thanks to an Alabama offensive line that ranked 17th in the country in PFF’s run-blocking grade, McClellan posted the third-highest rate of neutral vision grades on zone runs, but it was on those concepts that his other cerebral traits shone. His ability to manipulate defenders in order to create open lanes also showed up on gap runs (his 0.04 score there slightly exceeds the average of 0.03), but McClellan did a particularly good job of pressing hard on outside zone to encourage over-pursuit, momentarily pausing in the backfield to suck linebackers up the middle before diving to the edge in inside zone, and throwing dead leg feints in one direction before darting the other way around a key block. His work in that area earned him the fourth-highest zone manipulation grade among backs I’ve studied, a performance complemented and matched by his zone tracking, which also ranked fourth.

His best trait, however -- at least according to the grades he earned in my charting -- was his discipline on zone runs, which especially manifested itself on outside zone. There, McClellan did a great job of turning down fool’s gold opportunities to stay composed and carry to the edge, an approach that rewarded him with an 81-yard touchdown on this play against Texas from last season

Overall, I think McClellan’s film matches his statistical profile as decent but not great, and his performance as Alabama’s lead back will do a lot not just in determining the kind of draft capital we can expect for him in the spring, but in showing us what he can do under the burden of an expanded, perhaps every-down role. The struggles I noticed from him on gap runs are reflected in the on-field results -- he’s averaged 6.65 yards per carry and produced a Yards Per Carry+ mark of 1.20 on zone runs so far in his career, while those respective numbers on gap concepts are just 5.00 and -0.18 -- and with the way the NFL is trending, it would be nice to see him correct those issues as a senior. Unfortunately, less than a third of McClellan’s career carries have come on gap plays so far, so we may not get sufficient evidence to change our minds before we have to make rookie draft decisions on this guy. Similarly, the fact that the Tide offense will probably be led by a running quarterback in Jalen Milroe this season could mean that we don’t get to see McClellan unleashed in the sort of high-volume receiving role that some of his underlying metrics indicate he might thrive in.

Basically, there’s a wide range of outcomes on McClellan just by the nature of how his career has gone to date and how the questions needing answered about his skillset might not be adequately answered in 2023. I’ll be monitoring this one throughout the fall, but right now I’m pretty comfortable concluding that McClellan is a decently explosive outside zone runner with size and some sneaky three-down chops, like if Damien Harris and Jerome Ford had a baby. I certainly had him too low prior to writing this article (he was at RB55 in my devy rankings), but I’m also not convinced he deserves to be the top-ten runner he’s ranked as by some other devy services. I’ve got him at RB17 now, and a strong and question-answering 2023 could see him jump the likes of Devin Neal and Trey Benson.