I don’t have any actual anti-TreVeyon Henderson convictions on a personal level, but I probably qualify as a Henderson hater. The first eleven links that come up when you google “devy rb rankings” have Henderson ranked at the 1.7 spot on average, none of them have him ranked lower than RB3, but in my personal devy rankings, Henderson was at RB14 overall and RB5 in the upcoming draft class prior to the writing of this article. Such placement is obviously a massive departure from consensus, and I’m very open to the idea that I am underrating Henderson’s ability or professional potential and should have him higher. Because of that, I wanted to spend some time studying him more closely, and the results of my film-charting process from four Henderson games -- last season’s opener against Notre Dame as well as the 2021 contests against Rutgers, Indiana, and Penn State in which Henderson posted a combined stat-line of 60 carries for 395 yards -- are the main focus of this piece. My evaluation of the Ohio State runner has changed in some ways following that film study, and I might convince myself to move him up in the rankings by the end of writing this article, but I want to start by justifying the lowly position he occupied there prior to my charting of him.

Basically, Henderson earned himself a lower-than-consensus spot in my devy rankings because the underlying metrics associated with his per-play performance through two seasons in college have not been particularly impressive. As a runner, he posted the following numbers in 2021 and 2022.

I know that Henderson was hampered by a foot injury for much of last season, but I didn’t have him anywhere near devy RB1 even based on his freshman performance. He certainly has athletic juice, as evidenced by his high-end 2021 numbers in Breakaway Conversion Rate and missed tackles forced per attempt, as well as his objectively good marks from that season in raw yards per carry, YPC+, and Rushing Yards Over Expected per Attempt, where Jerrick Backous’ model over at campus2canton.com shows that Henderson’s 0.48 average was higher than those posted by either Breece Hall or Bijan Robinson, who (along with Kenneth Walker) were probably the best backs in college football at the time. I have no doubts about that aspect of Henderson’s game.

What concerned me following Henderson’s freshman campaign was the volatile nature of his per-carry production: with abysmal marks in both Relative Success Rate and Chunk Rate+, it’s clear that his impressive efficiency during that season came from infrequent splash plays and at the expense of down-to-down consistency. A negative CR+ shows that Henderson was reaching the secondary on his attempts at a lower rate than were the collective other backs at Ohio State, and a negative RSR -- and in this case, one that would land in the sixth percentile relative to how eventual NFL runners performed in college -- shows that Henderson was producing positive outcomes on his carries at a far lower rate than were the other Buckeye backs. To some extent, such a feature in a player’s metrics is a stylistic quirk, but exclusively hitting home runs is only good when you’re hitting home runs -- on the 93% of rushing attempts on which Henderson was not ripping off a 20+ yard gain in 2021, he was doing much less with his carries than other runners operating in the same offensive environment as he was. It was largely all-or-nothing without much sprinkling in of singles, doubles, or walks to keep his offense on schedule, a style of play that doesn’t inspire confidence in a player’s ability to run the ball consistently in the NFL.

Despite getting Reggie Bush and Christian McCaffrey comps following an undeniably impressive freshman season that saw him go 27-for-312 through the air as part of a 1500-yard and 19-touchdown from-scrimmage line, Henderson’s usage as a pass-catcher early on in his career was a far cry from the running back-as-wide-receiver stuff that those elite talents were tasked with either in college or as pros. I don’t think we should expect any issues with the bare receiving necessities from Henderson, as the 93.1% Catch Rate and 11.7 YAC per reception marks that he posted during his healthy first year land in the 97th and 85th percentiles, respectively, among eventual professionals, but the degree of difficulty on those targets and the repertoire of routes he was being asked to run are not indicative of elite ability outside the flats and the screen game. The 168 pass patterns he ran in 2021 contained 24th-percentile Route Diversity and very few non-basic route types: just 25% of his routes were on something other than a screen or checkdown-type pattern near the line of scrimmage, a rate in the 25th percentile among all collegiate backs, and over 40% of Henderson’s targets came on screen plays alone. Screens are an efficient play and Henderson has the hands and post-catch ability to make the most of them, but almost exclusively earning your receiving production on those and other kinds of dump-off passes isn’t the same as being a legitimately skilled receiver capable of threatening coverage beyond the line of scrimmage (like Bush and McCaffrey could and can), no matter how impressive your raw receptions and yardage totals are.

Based on TreVeyon Henderson’s on-field receiving usage, the Reggie Bush comps are more speculative than descriptive.

Basically, Henderson’s bonkers 2021 stat-lines weren’t matched by the sort of underlying indicators that would lead me to believe he was the best running back in college football (as a ranking as the devy RB1 would imply), so I’ve been lower than consensus on him since then (I realize I neglected to mention his 2022 receiving numbers: he caught four passes for 28 yards in eight games). That brings us back to the point of this article: I’ve now closely watched and carefully charted 60 carries from some of Henderson’s best games, with the insights gained through that process laid out below.

To start: despite the fact that I studied games that came exclusively from Henderson’s stellar 2021 season -- in which he forced missed tackles at an 80th-percentile rate according to Pro Football Focus -- or from prior to the foot injury he sustained against Toledo in Ohio State’s third contest of 2022, the dynamic back displayed through-contact ability in the charted sample that is far less than what you’d expect out of a guy who was listed at 215 pounds as a freshman and at 214 pounds last season:

The above numbers are scored on a -2-to-2 scale on a per-interaction basis with defenders, with -2 representing a successful tackle attempt on which the runner’s momentum is stopped and subsequently forced backwards by the defender, with 0 representing a stalemate, and 2 representing a completely broken tackle attempt. Among 21 running backs for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of carries (mostly the 2023 draft class along with Blake Corum, Raheim Sanders, Nick Singleton, and some other current college runners), Henderson is near the bottom of the population in powering through contact against each defensive position group, and is especially poor against linebackers. I don’t want to give the impression that he’s a limp noodle out there -- he did successfully break eleven total tackle attempts in the games that I watched -- but his performance in this specific area is simply not good relative to various styles and shapes of runners that I’ve watched and charted using the same criteria: his -0.23 score versus all defenders on aggregate is lower than the same for much smaller backs like Jahmyr Gibbs, Tyjae Spears, Eric Gray, and Devon Achane, and is higher than those of only Chase Brown and the 179-pound Deuce Vaughn. Due to this lack of play strength, I would not be surprised if Henderson’s listed weights have been substantially inflated on the Ohio State roster.

From a cerebral standpoint, I think Henderson is solid on zone concepts and actively good on gap concepts. His biggest issue as a zone runner is passivity: he earned the third-highest rate of neutrally-graded plays in the vision category on zone runs of any player I’ve studied, he earned just two positive grades in the decisiveness category on those plays, giving him the fifth-lowest overall score in that area, and despite the sixth-lowest rate of negatively-graded plays on vision runs in general, Henderson’s population-leading rate of neutrally-graded plays means that his aggregate score on zone runs is the third-lowest of all studied runners. That’s a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that refers to the machinations of my charting and grading processes, but it basically means that Henderson is not making a lot of mistakes on zone runs but still scores low as a zone runner overall because he’s also not making many positively-impactful decisions.

It is possible to exhibit patience, discipline, tracking, and manipulation, among other things, in positively-impactful ways without needing to make people miss in the backfield or create opportunities out of thin air, but it’s also true that Ohio State boasted the fourth- and fifth-best run-blocking offensive lines in 2022 and 2021, respectively, according to PFF, so it makes some sense that Henderson wasn’t pulling off a lot of extra-structural stuff back there. Also, for whatever it’s worth, my subjective takeaway from watching Henderson on zone runs was that he feels like a guy who could thrive on them, particularly on outside zone. He’s very smooth, and while I wouldn’t describe him as a one-cut runner, he has the sharp transitionary ability to stop and get upfield quickly, and he then has the burst to extend runs into the secondary when he does navigate through a crease.

Still, Henderson was substantially better on gap than zone runs during his healthy 2021: he averaged 8.25 yards per carry on the former and 6.46 on the latter, outdoing the other Buckeye runners by 2.13 yards per carry on gap concepts while “only” outdoing them by 1.38 yards on zone runs. His decision-making on those plays matched the on-field results: on gap runs across the sample of games that I watched, Henderson earned the seventh-highest overall score (and tied with Devon Achane, who I’m a big fan of) among the 21 runners I’ve studied, and his rate of negatively-graded plays was literally 0.0%. His neutral rate is still pretty high, but not as severely so as on zone runs, and it seems that the more rigid structure of gap plays is a more comfortable setting for Henderson, as it emboldens him to come out of his shell and be more creative behind the line of scrimmage. His vision grade on these runs ranks eighth among backs I’ve watched, and his manipulation and tracking are other highlights. He does a nice job of pressing to the line of scrimmage on duo runs, creating open lanes by drawing edge defenders or linebackers into traffic, and his pacing and positioning behind pullers is quite clean. I noted one run on which Henderson could have scraped the back of a block more tightly on his transition upfield, but I thought his spatial sense and focused approach while getting to his spots was generally very good.

Devon Achane is a zone-running maven who also graded out well on gap concepts, and early returns on TreVeyon Henderson’s ability are similarly positive in the latter area.

Ultimately, I’m moving Henderson up in my devy rankings (go look at them, he’s not at RB14 anymore). The raw athletic talent he possesses isn’t generational or anything, but it’s probably 9+ RAS-type stuff, and even pairing mediocre cerebral skill (at least in the case of his performance on zone runs) with that sort of juice is a decent recipe for success. He’s not my RB1, but I think I see it with Henderson: he’s like a toked out Kenneth Walker, a 1.25x version of Marlon Mack, or a 1.5x version of Darrell Henderson. My worry is that Henderson is a sneakily-undersized runner without much play strength (and I suspect that this is where a lot of his play-to-play inconsistency comes from, he just doesn’t break free from tacklers without focused ill-intent and a good head of steam), and if he hasn’t expanded his route-running repertoire as a now-upperclassman, I see some risk that he’s a Tevin Coleman-type tweener at the next level. The production, explosiveness, shiftiness (he posted an 85.7% success rate -- the highest among runners I’ve charted -- on a small sample of attempted evasive maneuvers), and blue-blood program pedigree will earn him early draft capital and the built-in opportunity that comes with it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns into one of these rocket ship dynasty assets whose early career flashes preemptively launch him into top-5ish running back territory before his NFL team realizes they want him in a split backfield.