Here’s the deal: I’m writing this in the early afternoon of a Friday on which my girlfriend went out of town for the weekend, so I’m looking forward to entering a state of intoxication, eating a plate of nachos, and playing some Civ III as soon as humanly possible. I intended to crank this article out yesterday but got distracted by an idea I had for a rushing efficiency metric, but I hit the sweet spot of that taking up too much of my time while also not making enough progress to be able to write about, so I’m back to my originally scheduled programming of a Ray Davis article. I spent the early part of this week watching the last of his film, and this piece will serve as more or less of a complete overview of how I view him as a prospect. That’s all the preamble you’re getting (and probably more than you wanted anyway), so let’s jump right into Davis’ rushing efficiency profile:

The first thing you’ll notice here is that Davis was – on aggregate – good but not great in terms of adding value to the efficiency of his running games throughout his college career. In fact, the only of his five seasons in which he posted a better-than-50th-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating (relative to those of NFL draftees, not those of all college backs) on legitimate volume was the 2022 season in which he notched a 132.2% mark as the lead back at Vanderbilt. He was similarly good on just 43 carries in 2021, but his other three years (at another two programs) saw him fall below the 120% threshold that I typically like to see from running back prospects (especially those playing at non-elite schools, which was true of Davis throughout his career):

His numbers as a freshman at Temple could reasonably be regarded as impressive if we want to grade on an age-curve (and I’d be on board with that), but that still makes just two of five years with good efficiency on something more than measly volume.

Nonetheless, there are positives to find in Davis’ rushing profile. If we simply acknowledge that he doesn’t have a ton of the explosive juice that would enable him to produce far more yardage on a per-carry basis than his situational baseline (a position backed up by his fairly average athletic testing numbers), it’s fair to focus on his impressive ability to churn out positive outcomes on a down-to-down basis at a rate higher than that baseline. After starting out his career with two straight seasons of negative Relative Success Rate numbers at Temple, an apparently more mature version of Davis finished that career out with three consecutive campaigns of RSR marks in at least the 88th percentile while playing in the SEC:

Those 2021-2023 numbers are excellent, and they make the dynamic between Davis’ per-carry efficiency and per-carry consistency similar to those in the collegiate profiles of guys like Josh Jacobs, AJ Dillon, Dameon Pierce, Javonte Williams, Brian Robinson, and Zamir White. Like them, Davis seems to be more of a chain-mover than a breakaway threat, and I think that’s okay.

To be clear, though, he hasn’t been bad in terms of creating big plays. His Chunk Rate+, Breakaway Conversion Rate, and missed tackles forced numbers are all somewhere between decent and good, something I’d attribute to an energetic running style that sees him hit holes hard and fight away from second-level defenders using a solid mix of elusiveness, effort, and a low center of gravity that lends him more power than his ho-hum combination of size and speed would suggest he possesses.

My charting of his film provided evidence of each of those various traits. In the last week, I studied four of Davis’ games from his final season, namely the matchups against Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Clemson in which he gained 428 yards on 66 attempts while scoring six rushing touchdowns and adding another 83 yards and two scores through the air. I still have the Louisville game left to watch, but I think the ones I’ve so far made it through offered me a pretty clear idea of the kind of player we’re dealing with.

Like I said above, Davis is an energetic runner. His decisiveness showed up over and over on zone concepts in particular, as his current grade in that area is the fourth-highest among the 35+ running backs I’ve studied in the last two offseasons. From a physicality standpoint, he’s a bit of a jack of all trades. His avoidance rate is slightly above-average, while he evaded defenders and minimized contact at essentially the same degree as Jonathon Brooks did in the games I’ve watched of each of them. Using my film-charting data to generate comps, Brooks actually comes out as Davis’ closest in terms of how they interact with would-be tacklers:

I don’t think those two guys resemble each other much from a stylistic standpoint – Brooks is more tightly wound and less jittery than Davis – but the results of their unique styles are pretty similar. Indeed, while Davis averaged 3.81 yards after contact per attempt in 2023 (an 85th-percentile mark among collegiate backs), Brooks averaged 3.91 (in the 87th percentile).

I also don’t think we should view Davis’ (or Brooks’) lack of through-contact success versus defensive linemen and defensive backs as an indictment of his literal power against those position groups, but rather as a symptom of his individual running style. As a dead-leg merchant who relies on suddenness to throw defenders off balance, Davis is naturally going to have the most success against linebackers, as he doesn’t have as much space or time to set up moves against defensive linemen and is often in more of a transitional mode (as opposed to being ready for another fight) by the time he has evaded a backer and reached the secondary. For what it’s worth, a wide range of players display similar distributions of through-contact ability versus the various position groups among guys I’ve studied, including Brooks, Izzy Abanikanda, De’Von Achane, and Quinshon Judkins.

That approach to making guys miss and fighting through tackle attempts also lends Davis some dynamism in the open field, particularly when he’s given space out in the flat as a dump-off receiver. He averaged 10.8 YAC per reception in 2023, top-ten among the 40 Power Five backs with 20+ catches on the year and more than guys like DJ Giddens, Devin Neal, Bucky Irving, and Jaylen Wright. He made the Florida defense look absolutely stupid in this area back in September:

I also think he has fine hands and some perhaps underrated versatility as a route-runner, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him carve out a role as a lunch-pail third-down option – similar to Jaylen Warren – at the next level.

From a decision-making standpoint on the ground, I was mostly unimpressed by Davis, but not the point that I think he can’t function in an NFL rushing attack. He graded out better on gap concepts than on zone runs (and gap plays made up nearly two thirds of his total workload in 2023), with particularly good marks in discipline and manipulation. He’s good at both turning down fool’s gold and – better yet – pressing close to his blocks in order to draw defenders into those faux creases before cutting toward a more viable path, but those skills definitely manifest more frequently on runs designed to hit a particular gap (especially trap plays).

When Davis is presented with more choices – as on duo, inside zone, and outside zone plays – he’s much less creative. His vision grade on zone runs is the fourth-lowest among backs I’ve charted, and while the decisiveness I mentioned earlier often helps him both hit tight and temporary creases and achieve success in setting up linebackers, it also gets him into trouble. His patience, discipline, and manipulation grades all fall in the bottom half of the charted population on zone runs, indicating to me somewhat of a lack of a plan at the line of scrimmage. His poor tracking grade on those plays is the best evidence of such a weakness, though: he picked up more negative tracking grades than in all the other decision-making categories combined in the games that I watched, as he frequently exploded toward the line of scrimmage before realizing he didn’t actually know where he was going, unnecessarily putting himself in arm’s reach of defenders or running into the backs of his blockers. His energetic style helps him evade tacklers, but it could stand to be curtailed a bit in pursuit of more mistake-free running.

Overall, I like Davis as a potential role player in an NFL backfield who also carries some three-down upside in short-term circumstances. The Jaylen Warren comp is almost too easy, and I could also see Davis as a poor man’s Kareem Hunt or an offroad version of the kind of car D’Andre Swift has turned out to be. Because he can kind of do everything and seems to be a high work-ethic, good character kind of guy, I anticipate him being stashable on dynasty rosters almost regardless of where he ends up in the draft.