Just a month ago and in the midst of his 72-459-3 rushing stretch against three ACC opponents, a large majority of respondents to the following Twitter poll thought neither Omarion Hampton nor any of his high-producing second-year brethren had done enough to either pass or earn equal footing with freshman phenoms-turned-sophomore slumpers Nick Singleton and Quinshon Judkins in the 2025 running back class:

Just two days later, I expressed some of my own skepticism about Hampton in the week’s CFB recap piece, none of which had anything to do with his on-field results. At the time, he had excellent marks in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, Relative Success Rate, and raw yards per carry and was the Power Five’s second-leading rusher (behind only Ollie Gordon). As history shows us, however, top-end numbers don’t always equal top-end professional outcomes, so even as Hampton added to his stellar season by ripping off another three consecutive 100-yard rushing performances and settling in as the nation’s leader in total yards after contact in the intervening weeks, my concerns about his elusiveness and athletic dynamism -- ones that, if quashed, would make Hampton a legitimate contender for the RB1 spot in next year’s class -- have remained.

In order to answer those questions, I spent Wednesday watching and charting three full games’ worth of Hampton’s carries from earlier this season, encompassing the combined 63-477-5 rushing line he posted (in addition to 5-51-1 as a receiver) in this year’s contests against Appalachian State, Minnesota, and Miami. Let’s explore the results of that film-charting process.

One of the red flags I perceived in Hampton’s profile back in late October was the 0.17 missed tackles he was forcing on a per-attempt basis, a low mark (in the 20th percentile among historical NFL draftees) in an area where low marks frequently warn of fraudulent rushing efficiency (as was the case with other good runners at non-elite Power Five programs like Chuba Hubbard, Abram Smith, Jermar Jefferson, and Joshua Kelley). I don’t think an inability to add value in interactions with defenders is something we’ll need to worry about with Hampton, though.

After noting the nature and source of an attempted tackle, I rate the running back’s success in dealing with that contact on a five-point scale:

On a sample of 70 touches, Hampton’s average physical encounter with a defender landed at 0.42 on this scale. Of the nearly 30 players that I’ve charted a significant amount of runs for in the last year, the population average sits at 0.19, only eight players scored at least 0.40, and and only four players -- Roschon Johnson, Zach Charbonnet, Miyan Williams, and Zach Evans -- scored higher than the North Carolina back.

Against linebackers specifically, Hampton’s 0.70 puts him in a class of his own, as only four other backs (the same guys I listed in the previous paragraph) land above the 0.50 mark and only Johnson reaches the 0.60 threshold (at exactly 0.60). Part of that success results from Hampton’s being a big and powerful guy at 6-feet tall and 220 pounds, but I also think he’s smart in the way that he maximizes the yardage available on each carry.

We typically think of “finishing runs” in the Earl Campbell-ian sense of seeking out contact and delivering extra punishment, but Hampton frequently does so by identifying the most charitable angle from which to approach impending contact, accelerating on that trajectory, and then churning his feet, pumping his knees, and wriggling his torso around to squeeze every possible inch out of each point of contact. He breaks his share of tackles, but he also accumulates a lot of hidden yardage on the tackles that he doesn’t break:

Pro Football Focus has Hampton’s missed tackles forced per attempt numbers up to 0.27 now (a 79th-percentile mark that matches the career numbers for Kareem Hunt, Breece Hall, and Charbonnet), but I still would not describe him as a particularly elusive runner, at least in the sense that making people miss is not a big part of his game. He attempted just one evasive maneuver for every 15 physical encounters with defenders in the sample of carries that I watched, producing the second-lowest avoidance rate of any back I’ve charted so far (the population average is one evasive maneuver for every three physical encounters with defenders). This is more a stylistic point than a criticism, but I think his film shows that, to a certain degree, Hampton does lack the sort of “bouncy and elastic athleticism” that I speculated in October that he might and that lent an explosive aesthetic to the games of past prospects like Hall and Joe Mixon (as well as perhaps to that of TreVeyon Henderson in this year’s class). He has enough lateral agility and good timing to elude a tackle when the situation calls for it (as the jump cut at 0:11 in the above video shows), but Hampton’s hard-charging style suggests a closer relation to the blue-collar Hunt, Charbonnet, and Josh Jacobs branches of the tackle-breaking family tree. Just as Hampton is doing this year, each of those guys averaged more than four yards after contact per attempt during their most productive college seasons.

From a decision-making standpoint, I thought Hampton was pretty good. His workload at North Carolina has skewed very zone-heavy so far in his career, and he navigated a heavy diet of inside zone runs quite nicely in the games that I watched. His composite vision grade of 0.47 on those plays ranks fourth among the backs I’ve studied (behind De’Von Achane, DeWayne McBride, and Jahmyr Gibbs), and his decisiveness grade of 0.49 laps the field (McBride, Singleton, and Chase Brown are all tied for second at 0.23). He earned positive grades in both vision and decisiveness on the same play 14 times across his 53 zone runs in the three charted games:

That combination of sound gap selection and quick processing has brought Hampton a lot of success: despite playing behind PFF’s 101st-ranked run-blocking unit, he has the fourth-highest Success Rate and the third-highest per-carry average out of 41 Power Five runners with at least 100 zone attempts this season (according to Sports Info Solutions).

Hampton’s biggest weakness is in tracking. He didn’t run a ton of gap plays in the games that I watched, but his -0.18 tracking grade on those runs is easily the lowest among backs I’ve charted. He didn’t score quite as badly on aggregate on zone runs, but he still earned four negative grades along the way, so I’m willing to say that spatial awareness and economy of movement are things Hampton could stand to improve on in general:

It’s obviously impossible to avoid ever running into someone else on the field, but many of Hampton’s errors in that short compilation were caused by overstepping, cutting too widely, or drifting into space instead of scraping his blocks. All of those things are correctable and would make a meaningful difference for a player who already has a good feel for what holes he should be hitting.

Overall, I came away from this film-charting process pretty impressed with what I saw from Hampton. He’s one of the most physical runners I’ve watched at the same time as being one of the better inside zone decision-makers I’ve watched, a combination that makes him pretty unique among that group. I’m certainly more impressed with Hampton’s tape than I was of Singleton’s, and probably also than I was of Judkins’. I also thought Hampton caught the ball cleanly and was actively good in pass protection (an area of film study where I don’t feel at all confident in my evaluative abilities, but for whatever it’s worth, the PFF grades from those games agreed with my assessment), giving him legitimate every-down potential at the next level. I went into this tape study wondering if Hampton was a bona fide contender for the RB1 spot in 2025, and -- pending Ollie Gordon’s film -- I now view him as the favorite.