We’re at an interesting point of the season. Rookie talk will start to dominate discourse after the National Championship Game is played on January 8th and especially during Senior Bowl week less than a month later, but until then, we’re left with a slow trickle of college bowl games, the end of the redraft and dynasty fantasy seasons, and the real life NFL playoffs. In terms of what this website is dedicated to covering -- running back evaluations -- there’s not a ton going on for the next few weeks, providing me with a nice opportunity to set aside rookie evals and NFL player takes and solidify thoughts on some of the best non-draft-eligible college runners in the country.
Over the last few weeks, that has meant checking in with the most prominent freshman backs, grinding some Omarion Hampton tape, and revamping the devy rankings as a whole in between weekly college recap articles, and my intention has been to follow those things up with some Ollie Gordon film study. Unfortunately, the black market of all-22 film has yet to produce any such tape within grabbing distance of my grubby little paws, and there’s also not much in the way of broadcast cut-ups of Gordon available on YouTube. It’s almost funny that there’s no legitimate way of studying game film of the guy who was named the best running back in all of major college football this season, but that appears to be the reality (and if anyone reading this knows of a solution to these problems, I’d love to be informed). As a result, this will not be a film-grinding article but a classic, Breakout Finder-era deep dive into Gordon’s data profile. We’re going to figure out how good he is, we’re just going to do it with one arm tied behind our back for now (just like the good ol’ days).
Oklahoma State still has an upcoming matchup against Texas A&M in the TaxAct Texas Bowl, but here is how Gordon’s 2023 rushing performance looks as of today:
We’ll get to the numbers that aren’t above the 90th percentiles in a bit, but it’s first appropriate to dwell on the fact that Gordon was incredible this year. If we treat his current stats as season-end marks, he joins Breece Hall and Kenneth Walker (both in 2021) as the only college runners since 2018 (when box count data became available) to post a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating over the 160% threshold on a 200+ carry workload and relative to teammates whose high school recruiting ratings were in the 3+ star range. He has faced 6.70 defenders in the box on his average rushing attempt (a mark in the 61st percentile among current college backs), and no other runner in that post-2017 group has ever outgained their backfield teammates by more than two yards per carry while facing box counts that were as relatively heavy as those Gordon has run into this season (the one who comes closest is Travis Etienne, who outgained his Clemson teammates by 2.02 yards per carry on a 206-attempt workload back in 2019, but with a just a 66th-percentile Box Count+ mark of 0.09). In other words: no high-volume runner since box count data became available has ever transcended his situation to the extreme degree that Gordon did this year. Dude won the Doak Walker Award behind an offensive line that a) propelled the other backs on the team to just 4.17 yards per carry and b) currently ranks 100th in the country (and bottom-two in the Big 12!) in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking rating.
Having said that, the other numbers scare me just a bit. A low raw Success Rate (and Gordon’s is the lowest among all Power Five backs with at least 200 attempts this season) isn’t necessarily reflective of poor running back play, but a Relative Success Rate well into the negatives is harder to forgive and kind of puzzling in this particular instance.. We’ve seen positive-BAE Rating, negative-RSR backs succeed in the league before, but most often in the space back archetype (Jahmyr Gibbs, James Cook, D’Andre Swift, Michael Carter, etc), a mold that the 6’1 and 211-pound Gordon doesn’t fit into at all. It’s also rare to see such an extreme difference between a player’s efficiency and consistency on the ground: only two other 200+ attempt backs in the box count data era -- Darrell Henderson in 2018 and our 2021 version of Hall -- have posted negative RSRs next to BAE Ratings above the 150% mark, and both of them had -0.7% RSRs that hardly compare to Gordon’s -2.7%.
Such a dynamic in Gordon’s game has resulted in a heavy reliance on big plays for his production. His excellent marks in Chunk Rate+ and Breakaway Conversion Rate indicate that Gordon is ripping off long runs at a high clip, but those plays account for a disproportionate amount of his overall yardage. While high-volume collegiate runners (those with at least 100 attempts) have combined to gain just over 30% of their collective yardage in the open field (anything ten yards beyond the line of scrimmage) this season, 44.5% of Gordon’s 1614 rushing yards have come in the open field. That mark is the highest among all 100+ carry runners in the country and easily beats out the final-season numbers for every notable player in the 2023 and 2022 running back classes:
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to gain a lot of your yards in the open field (you can imagine a perfect running back who scores on every play, and he would naturally gain the majority of his yardage 10+ yards beyond the line of scrimmage), but we already know that Gordon is succeeding on a low percentage of his rushing attempts. His big play production considered alongside his low down-to-down consistency shows him to be one of the most volatile college runners in recent history.
This also isn’t a one-year aberration. As a freshman in 2022, Gordon posted a -0.6% RSR next to a 143.6% BAE Rating propped up by 83rd- and 79th-percentile marks in CR+ and BCR, respectively. Austin Nace described him as a “build-up speed back” who is “not the best athlete” in campus2canton.com’s 2022 Freshman & Supplemental Draft Guide, and while I again have not yet studied his tape and therefore reserve the right to change these opinions, Gordon has struck me in similar ways in the games and highlight clips that I’ve watched (I also don’t mean to insinuate that Austin thought Gordon was bad; he also praised his toughness, vision, and three-down potential while advising readers to expect early production). I wouldn’t quite describe him as stiff, but with height and a long stride that seem to limit his ability to accelerate, decelerate, and make lateral cuts in ways that simply aren’t a problem for more compact runners, Gordon is a bit of a smooth lumberer. I’m eager to sort through these drive-by impressions when legitimate film becomes available, but I’ve seen (stylistic) shades of Derrick Henry, Najee Harris, Melvin Gordon, and Eric Dickerson at various times when watching him run.
Some of Gordon’s apparent lack of lateral agility is reflected in the missed tackles forced per attempt numbers, where he’s just above average. The best MTF guys end up over the 0.30 threshold and often fall into one of two categories: 1) explosive and often juke-happy athletes like Etienne, Kenneth Walker, and Bijan Robinson, or 2) high-effort, Tasmanian devil-style chaos backs like David Montgomery, Zack Moss, and Javonte Williams. Gordon is more like this:
Like the giraffe, Gordon’s strengths aren’t conducive to escaping in tight quarters, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to take either of them down. Historical weight gain data indicates that Gordon is like to measure in at 6’ ⅞” and 220 pounds at his eventual NFL Combine, and he’s already a big back who gains a ton of yards after contact (he also looks bigger to me than the 6’1 and 211 pounds he’s currently listed at, a subjective take backed up by the fact that head coach Mike Gundy was confident last April that Gordon would bulk up to 230 pounds via the program’s strength and conditioning regimen by the time August of 2022 rolled around). His rate of 3.69 such yards on a per-attempt basis ranks third among Power Five backs with at least 200 attempts this season (behind Hampton and Audric Estime), and that average would have ranked no lower than seventh in any such group in any year since PFF started tracking the stat back in 2014. Gordon is a notably powerful runner, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he charts out for me in that area on film.
Despite that YAC ability, I think Gordon’s lateral limitations and need for build-up room could contribute to his inconsistent per-carry output. I don’t think such an effect is hard to envision: to varying degrees, we’ve seen at times from Henry, Braelon Allen, AJ Dillon, Latavius Murray, and other big, runaway train-style backs that if your size and body type make it difficult for you to quickly change directions and evade tacklers in tight confines, then your team might have to live with some one-yard losses and two-yard duds while trying to take advantage of your breakaway abilities. The right scheme fit and requisite level of offensive line competence can limit the impact of those shortcomings (and accentuate their corresponding strengths), but whatever was going on at Oklahoma State this season interacted with Gordon’s running style in a way that produced strikeouts nearly as often as it did extra-base hits.
I’m interested to see how that all-or-nothing style develops both over time and perhaps in a different situation next season. At least prior to being able to get my hands on some Gordon film, his inconsistency is enough to keep him behind Hampton in my early 2025 rankings.