Almost exactly one year ago and on the very first episode of The Hero RB Show, I proclaimed that Sean Tucker was “one of the best pure runners in college football” and that “his profile is essentially Kenneth Walker’s profile if Kenneth Walker had broken out in year one and had some semblance of receiving chops,” and honestly, I don’t think that was much of an exaggeration given the similarities between the two backs. Walker came into the league running a 4.38 at 5’9 2/8” and 211 pounds after being a dominant rusher who didn’t show much in the receiving game at a non-powerhouse Big Ten school, while Tucker ran 10.77 in the 100-meter dash as a high school sophomore (in addition to having been tracked at 21 miles per hour on the field in college), was listed at the same 5’10 and 210 pounds in 2021 that Walker was listed at in the same year (Walker is actually Tucker’s second-closest athletic comp according to campus2canton.com’s Athletic Comparison Tool), and had just come off a season in which he led his conference in rushing (by over 250 yards) while averaging over six yards per carry and showing just a little bit in the receiving game at a non-powerhouse ACC school. At the time, I’d argue the comparison was absolutely on point, at the very least from a bird’s-eye-view and through an analytical lens.

Michigan State Kenneth Walker looked a lot like Syracuse Sean Tucker.

Since then, Tucker posted another 1000-yard rushing season in the ACC, accounted for over 30% of Syracuse’s offensive production for the second year in a row, and earned a 91st-percentile portion of the team’s targets (15.5%) while hauling in 36 passes, more than double his pre-2022 career total. If he was Walker plus some a year ago, then surely he’s one of the no-doubt prospects in this running back class now, right?

Alas, Tucker’s career marks in various advanced rushing efficiency metrics are not so #PL34SED:

Such final figures are a far cry from Walker’s:

Alright, so Tucker is probably not quite the dawg that K9 is, but could he be a different animal and the same beast? It’s difficult to say, because the shape of his rushing efficiency profile is fairly bizarre, particularly given the style of play we know Tucker to employ.

Tucker is a relatively undersized back at 5’9 2/8” and 207 pounds, and while he didn’t run at the Combine (Syracuse’s Pro Day is on Monday), it’s clear that he’s a very fast and explosive runner capable of hitting home runs on nearly any touch. If Tucker runs the 4.46 that @zwkfootball predicts (and his 40-time projections have been pretty damn good so far), guys like Jerome Ford, Ty Johnson, JK Dobbins, Mike Boone, and Darrell Henderson -- fast, breakaway runners -- will all have physical profiles that are at least a 95% match to Tucker’s.

Generally, guys like that will have on-field metric profiles that match their physical skillsets: true to form, each one of the above five backs finished his college career with a Breakaway Conversion Rate above the 70th percentile. That’s obviously not true of Tucker, who performed below the historical average in that area as well as in Chunk Rate+, where he barely outdid the collective explosive run rate of the other backs at Syracuse. Conversely, Tucker was pretty successful at churning out positive outcomes on a consistent basis relative to those teammates, as his 61st-percentile Relative Success Rate is abnormally high for a guy who supposedly fits in the home run hitter category.

In my opinion, we can make better sense of the Tucker rushing profile by not thinking of him so much in terms of those explosive traits, but in what the numbers tell us actually happened on the field. We don’t have to look at the subpar CR+ and BCR marks and pigeonhole ourselves into some contrarian “Sean Tucker isn’t actually a big-play runner” take, but we can acknowledge the speed, set it aside, and then let the big-picture numbers say what they say.

What they say is that, on aggregate, Tucker was a consistent down-to-down runner who ran into heavy defensive fronts and offered slightly more on a per-carry basis than what his teammates delivered. Add in the speed as the cherry on top, and that’s a player I’m interested in.

However, the “slightly more” that Tucker was offering on a per-carry basis does land in a bit of a dead zone for historical running back prospects:

Simply put, 15% is just not an impressive degree to which a running back prospect outdoes his college teammates on the ground, and it’s not as if Tucker should get some subjective boost in this area to account for the unique talent that his backfield mates possessed: I like LeQuint Allen, but the non-Tucker runners at Syracuse collectively averaged a 2.77-star rating as high school recruits, which would make them a 30th-percentile group among teammates of backs drafted since 2007.

However, I do think context matters a bit in this particular case. Like Tank Bigsby, Tucker burst onto the scene as a ridiculously efficient runner as a true freshman in 2020 before taking significant steps back in the subsequent years:

The solid-but-unspectacular Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate numbers that Tucker put on wax in 2021 virtually mirror his career marks in the same categories and are well within the range of normal for a highly productive college back, but unless he fell victim to some sort of Moron Mountain talent-stealing operation, something was up with Tucker in 2022. He did get hurt in Syracuse’s opening contest against Louisville, but he returned, ended up gaining 184 scrimmage yards in the game, and downplayed the severity of the injury in the post-game press conference. Over the next three weeks, though, Tucker averaged 3.24 yards per carry against UConn, Purdue, and Virginia, none of whom had defenses that finished in the top-50 in the country in rushing yards allowed per game (and only Virginia finished in the top-50 in yards per carry allowed, at #38). Then, after a three-game stretch in which he averaged 9.14 yards per carry against Wagner (an FCS school), NC State, and Clemson, Tucker fell back down to earth with a trifecta of sub-4.0 YPC games against some legitimately stout defenses from Notre Dame, Pitt, and Florida State. He then finished up the year with a pair of 100-yard, 6-YPC performances against Wake Forest and Boston College.

Basically, it was an up-and-down year for Tucker, and a far cry from the consistent success he’d experienced as an underclassman -- he’d averaged fewer than four yards per carry in just two of his 21 career games coming into the year. So what happened? It’s possible he was playing hurt throughout or even at different points of the season, but there’s little concrete evidence of that being the case. The Syracuse bloggers had their fair share of theories for what might have contributed to the All-ACC runner’s dip in play, most notably “incohesive play-calling” from the offensive staff that did not allow Tucker to get into a rhythm.

I’m open to some form of that general idea, and while it’s true that Syracuse’s pass/run ratios were not much different in 2022 than they collectively had been in 2020 and 2021 (0.83 to 0.82), last season did see Tucker with a much heavier dose of gap concepts in the running game than he’d had previously.

By my estimation, Tucker is a quality decision-maker in the context of both blocking schemes, but it’s become apparent to me through my film study of these 2023 runners (and this is not a profound statement) that technical and cerebral skills matter less on gap runs than they do on zone runs. The average net grade on zone concepts for the rookie running backs for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of carries is 0.65, while the average net grade on gap concepts for the same players is 0.51. I won’t dive deeply here into the minutiae of what that means, but it essentially indicates that players are able to positively impact zone runs via their instincts, technical skills, and decision-making processes far more often than they are able to do the same on gap runs. It might be helpful (though not precisely accurate) to think of those net grades in terms of percentages -- the decisions of running backs significantly alter the outcomes (at least at the line of scrimmage) of nearly two thirds of zone runs but of just over half of gap runs.

That leaves room for gap runners to separate themselves (or at least make up for their technical or mental shortcomings) via their athletic or physical prowess, often in the form of power, contact balance, or tackle-breaking ability in general. This is an area where Tucker is not very good:

A more robust breakdown of my film charting process and the on-field meanings of these numbers can be found here, but essentially what this tells us is that Tucker is far less effective at powering through contact from all types of would-be tacklers than the vast majority of other backs in this class are. The only 2023 runner I’ve charted so far with a worse overall performance in this area is Chase Brown.

Given the relative lack of impact that decision-making has on the outcomes of gap runs, an inability to create extra yardage through contact is a flaw that can significantly hinder a player’s usefulness on those plays. As zone concepts lost grip of their monopoly on the Syracuse running game in 2022 (Tucker carried the ball on 2.42 zone runs for every gap-scheme carry in 2020 and 2021, while that ratio dropped to just 1.49 in 2022), it therefore makes sense that the zone-suited, light-running Tucker would experience a resulting dip in efficiency.

Another piece of the puzzle is the massive disparity between the defensive fronts that Tucker ran into last season and the defensive fronts that Allen and the other Orange runners faced. The only running backs drafted in the last four years (2018 is as far back as the college box count data goes over at Sports Info Solutions) who entered the league with career marks in Box Count+ as severely high as what Tucker experienced in that area in 2022 are Kevin Harris, Javonte Williams, Hassan Haskins, Snoop Conner, and Josh Jacobs. Only 15 lead backs in all of college football (out of 131 teams!) ran into boxes that were as relatively heavy (in the context of what their teammates faced) as Tucker’s were last season.

Generally, backs who run into loaded defensive fronts do so (at least in part) because they don’t contribute much as receivers. If you’re facing a lot more defensive personnel on your rushing attempts than your teammates do, it’s likely that you don’t pose (or at least when you’re on the field, your offense doesn’t pose as) much of a threat in the passing game. Indeed, those 15 backs who ran into boxes as heavy as those Tucker faced averaged just 13.3 receptions a piece over the course of last season, and just two of them crested the 20-reception threshold. Tucker, as we know, was a big piece of the Syracuse passing game.

It’s typically the big, two-down pounders like Kevin Harris that we see facing defensive fronts as heavy as those Sean Tucker ran into last season.

It’s possible that such a combination contributed to Tucker’s lessened effectiveness on the ground as a junior. It’s one thing to run into packed boxes if you’re getting a breather on third downs and in obvious passing situations, and it’s one thing to have juice in the receiving game if you’re not being asked to carry a high-volume workload into heavy traffic, but Tucker received neither reprieve. For his career, he’s one of only three players in this running back class (along with Evan Hull and Devon Achane, who both functioned in similar high-volume, dual-threat roles as the most dynamic options in their own ineffective offenses) who averaged at least 15 carries per game, left school with even a 60th-percentile Box Count+, and were targeted on at least 10% of their team’s pass attempts, a nasty trifecta of bellcow business that came to a head in Tucker’s 2022 season.

While we’d obviously prefer that a player be able to hold up efficiency-wise under those adverse circumstances, I think the context of those unique external factors (in addition to the possibility of injury, the vague and supposed incohesiveness of the offense’s play-calling, etc.) are worth considering in Tucker’s particular case. After all, in 2020 and 2021, when he was seeing basically the same level of defensive attention as were the other backs on the team (and, coincidentally or not, also did not average even two receptions per game), Tucker averaged nearly a yard per carry more than what those guys contributed on the ground. Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating certainly accounts for much of the effect of that more level playing field, but if Tucker’s weakness as a ball-carrier is inside runs that nerf his best qualities and depend relatively heavily on strength and power, then it makes sense that he’d be less efficient -- even according to BAE Rating -- when he spends a higher percentage of his time running (poorly) up the B gap and into a loaded box.

Considering all that context, Tucker is one of the more interesting backs in this class beyond the five or so stud-level talents at the top. He’s not going to be a scheme fit everywhere (and the league is trending more gap-heavy in the running game), and he’s likely not well-suited to a big, Najee Harris-style three-down workload, but I don’t think anybody wants or is expecting that from him. In the right situation, Tucker can be a composed and decisive runner with high-level juice in the open field. He probably fits best as someone’s 1B, but that freshman season is enticing enough to hold out hope for more.