Nick Singleton is a rising sophomore who ran for over 1000 yards as a 219-pound freshman in the Big Ten after being rated as a 5-star prospect and the number-one running back in the 2022 recruiting class. He’s also currently my RB2 in devy, ahead of Quinshon Judkins and behind only Raheim Sanders, a spot he earned largely on the back of his ridiculous efficiency numbers as a first-year player in one of the best conferences in the country:

Note that those percentile ranks are relative to eventual NFL draftees and not just to other college backs -- the numbers that Singleton put up as a true freshman in a Power Five conference and relative to a group of backfield teammates on a top-10 Penn State team that averaged a collective 3.49-star rating as high school recruits (a 63rd-percentile mark among teammates of backs drafted since 2007) were stupid good. The only guys in my database who really come close to matching them over the course of their entire college careers are Tyler Allgeier, Keaton Mitchell, Kenneth Gainwell, and DeWayne McBride, who all did their damage at the Group of Five level:

Given the uniqueness of his rushing efficiency profile -- and in order to better understand how he came to those fantastic numbers -- I wanted to study Singleton closer, so I watched and charted four of his games from last season, namely the contests against Ohio, Auburn, Michigan, and Ohio State that ran the level-of-competition gamut and represented a solid mix of great (he went 10-124-2 against Auburn) and rough (6-19 against Michigan) performances that, in total, saw him gain 367 yards on 40 attempts. Let’s dive into the results of that process.

I want to start with some supremely unprofound (yet true and meaningful), non-charting takeaways from my film study. First, Singleton is a rare size/speed beast with incredible burst. Especially at 219 pounds (and he’s now listed at 228 on Penn State’s website), his ability to accelerate away from closing defenders and erase angles in the open field is special, as evidenced by the long runs he pulls off in this mini-compilation:

The crew over at campus2canton.com has tracked Singleton’s on-field speed at 22 miles per hour, and according to 247Sports, he has a verified personal best of 10.89 seconds in the 100 meter dash, ridiculous times that place him among the fastest ball-carriers in the NFL from last season (behind only Parris Campbell and Kenneth Walker) and right in line with the high school track times for guys like Christian McCaffrey and Brandin Cooks, respectively. If Singleton simply cracks the 4.50 threshold in the 40-yard dash at his eventual NFL Combine at the 219 pounds he weighed last season, he’ll be in the same Speed Score range as guys like DeAngelo Williams, Tony Pollard, Joe Mixon, and CJ Spiller. Given that McCaffrey ran a 4.48 and each of Campbell, Walker, and Cooks landed in the 4.3s, I anticipate Singleton clearing that benchmark with time to spare.

That explosiveness pairs well with Singleton’s decisiveness, easily his best and most prominent cerebral trait based on the charting I’ve done on him so far:

None of the other 18 backs that I’ve charted a significant amount of runs for (a group that includes 16 guys from the 2023 class as well as Sanders and Blake Corum) exhibited greater see-it-and-go ability on zone runs than Singleton did in the sample that I watched, and of the guys who matched him -- McBride and Chase Brown -- only McBride saw that ability carry over to his execution on gap-style runs (he earns a 0.15 decisiveness grade on those concepts), as Brown’s -0.02 decisiveness grade on such plays is the lowest of any runner that I’ve watched. Basically, I’m pretty confident in concluding that Singleton’s marks here are legit -- it’s certainly possible that a larger sample would result in his scores reverting toward the mean somewhat, but he’s clearly a quick-trigger runner whose explosive, big-play ability is as much a function of his quick decision-making as it is of his high-end physical traits.

Frustratingly, the other cerebral areas of running back play don’t strike me as strengths of Singleton’s at this point in his development. In fact, there’s not a single other of my charting categories in which he scored higher than the population average on aggregate (his 0.08 tracking grade on zone runs is technically higher than the mean of 0.06, but that’s the result of one positive grade and is offset in my mind by a -0.11 grade in the same category on gap plays that is easily the lowest among backs I’ve watched so far, with Zach Charbonnet’s -0.04 representing the closest anyone comes). Notably, Singleton made just as many incorrect (or at least detrimental) vision-related decisions on zone runs as he did correct ones, giving him a 0.00 vision grade on those plays that falls far short of the population average of 0.36. He wasn’t particularly impactful in a negative way in most other areas, but I also didn’t give him a single positive grade in any of the patience, discipline, or manipulation categories, an indication that he’s often just sort of along for the ride of whatever is blocked for him on a given play. If he sees a hole, he’s going to hit it hard and fast, but he’s not creating his own opportunities at the line of scrimmage much at all.

That probably sounds like a style that would result in some inconsistent down-to-down output, and it is: Singleton’s incredible marks in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Breakaway Conversion Rate are accompanied by subpar marks in Relative Success Rate and Chunk Rate+ (1.9% and 0.5%, respectively, numbers that each land in the 43rd percentile among eventual NFL backs), phenomena that place runners highly on the Volatility Index and indicate high efficiency fueled by splash plays that mask inconsistency. Indeed, among 84 Power Five backs with at least 100 carries last season, Singleton scored sixth-highest on that Index, trailing only Jaydn Ott (another productive freshman), Israel Abanikanda (a classic swing-for-the-fences guy), Jalen Berger, Christian Turner, and Jahmyr Gibbs (whose consistency was nerfed by a lack of power and some skittish tendencies at the line of scrimmage) in terms of carry-to-carry volatility.

Like Izzy Abanikanda, Nick Singleton was an uber efficient but also inconsistent runner in 2022.

I don’t want to harp on Singleton too hard for that, though. He was a freshman, and the players I’m comparing him to (whether via film charting or data analysis) are NFL-quality runners with the advantage of multiple years of collegiate experience over him. I also haven’t done the age curve-based analysis that would tell me what a “good” RSR or CR+ or vision grade would be at various points of an amateur runner’s development. This is moment-in-time stuff meant to give a snapshot of the kind of strengths and weaknesses that Singleton possessed as a first-year player, and it’s understandable that a size/speed beast who 247Sports’ Gabe Brooks said “will need to harness run-bouncing tendencies vs. P5 competition” in his scouting report of Singleton as a high school recruit would rely on athletic gifts early on in his career at the next level.

What makes less sense to me is the lack of power with which Singleton seems to run. Brooks said in that same scouting report that the five-star back was an “elite run finisher” who “shows impressive contact balance and gains yardage through tacklers” while exhibiting “exceptional run violence.” He even expressed the worry that Singleton’s “physical superiority and violent field demeanor could lead to unnecessary wear and tear.” I don’t doubt that Brooks was spot on in his evaluation of Singleton as a high school runner, but I did not see those same things in his freshman tape at all. I was repeatedly struck by how easily Singleton went down on contact, as he rarely generated extra yards through tackle attempts and very infrequently broke them. Against linebackers specifically, the Nittany Lion’s through-contact performance resulted in an aggregate score of -0.33, lower than the marks earned by all but two guys that I’ve charted (Brown and Eric Gray), including sub-200-pound runners like Devon Achane, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Deuce Vaughn. Pro Football Focus’ metrics back up these insights: Singleton’s 0.22 rate of missed tackles forced per attempt ranked basically dead average (86th) among 169 qualifying runners in that category last season, and would have ranked near the bottom of backs selected in the 2023 draft (ahead of the career MTF per attempt numbers of only Vaughn and Lew Nichols).

Ultimately, I’m keeping Singleton at the RB2 spot in my devy rankings for now. He’s a five-star guy who was both productive and super efficient as a true freshman against quality competition, and especially given that he already has NFL workhorse size, I’m not going to overthink this one right now. Hopefully he’ll improve upon some of the soft spots in his game as he returns to college football with a year of experience under his belt in 2023. Still, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for the struggles he showed as a freshman in case they persist as legitimate weaknesses in his game, and I reserve the right to move him down the rankings even this offseason as I continue watching film on these highly-touted college backs, particularly Judkins.