I’ve never been much of a Will Shipley guy. In a July of 2022 episode of the Hero RB Show – recorded on the heels of Shipley’s 800-yard, 11-touchdown true freshman season on a top-15 Clemson team – I noted that “his pedigree and production [were] enough for me to give him the benefit of the doubt”, but that “his unimpressive per-touch performance” made him a “scary buy” in devy leagues, where – at the time – he was ranked as the RB5 overall and as the RB2 in the 2024 draft class.

Even when he had a better (by typical production and advanced efficiency data standards) year as a sophomore, my positive impressions of Shipley’s profile were rather tenuous, as he seemed to just be kind of boring. He managed to maintain – in the eyes of general consensus – his high school recruiting-derived status as an exciting prospect, but in a way that felt flimsy to me. His 2023 season – one which saw him fall behind Phil Mafah in the backfield pecking order and post the below efficiency marks – emboldened my interpretation of his potential as being superficial (and perhaps completely illusory):

Still, enough pro-Shipley sentiment has existed over the last few years – among the things I care about are his five-star recruiting status (he was a more highly-touted high school player than were D’Andre Swift, Christian McCaffrey, Jahmyr Gibbs, Saquon Barkley, Travis Etienne, and countless more no-doubt studs), his objectively good production profile (he broke out as a true freshman, playerprofiler.com has his Dominator Rating as a 63rd-percentile mark, and my production database shows his career marks to most closely match the average profile of recent second round draft picks), his impressive athletic profile (including a 4.46 forty, a 38.5-inch vertical, and a 93rd-percentile Agility Score), and the fact that several analysts I respect remain enthusiastic about his skillset and potential (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) – that I felt it necessary to take seriously the possibility that Shipley’s stagnant and somewhat mediocre profile obscures some still-exciting NFL upside.

In order to determine what that upside might look like, we go to the film, but let’s first stop to establish the statistical baseline to which our tape-based insights are tethered. To that end, here are Shipley’s career marks in the various rushing efficiency metrics that I like to look at:

As the percentile numbers indicate, most of these marks are not at all impressive relative to what past NFL prospects did during their own college careers. It’s true that Shipley was playing with a talented group of backfield teammates – Mafah was a four-star recruit in his own right – but even guys like Miyan Williams and Trey Sermon left school with Box-Adjusted Efficiency Ratings above the 110% threshold after having played with more highly-touted running mates than Shipley did at Clemson. Even grading him on a significant curve reveals his performance to have been sub-standard, and there’s also the reality that the metrics on the above table that have nothing to do with how Shipley’s teammates performed – namely, Breakaway Conversion Rate and missed tackles forced per attempt – show him to have been a relatively unimpressive tackle-breaker and open-field runner (in fact, Shipley’s marks in both of those categories would have been below-average among all FBS runners in 2023, so he’s been “relatively unimpressive” whether that comparison refers to other NFL draft prospects or just college running backs in general).

Still, it is true that over the course of his career – and particularly (you could even argue most importantly) as an underclassman – Shipley outperformed a pretty talented group of backfield teammates, both in terms of the yardage he was gaining on a per-carry basis and in terms of how often he was generating successful outcomes on his rushing attempts. We have to balance that reality with the fact that he kind of just barely did so, and consider both of those things alongside the fact that smart people watch Shipley play football and come away impressed. Contextual factors surrounding his up-and-down career paired with insights from my own process of watching Shipley play football have enabled me to construct a coherent (at least in my mind) reconciliation of these various considerations.

Let’s first refer to the annually-declining performance of the Clemson offensive line, illustrated below by their ranks among various groups of teams in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking rating:

During Shipley’s two “good” seasons (if I can just broadly categorize the 2021 and 2022 campaigns in which he posted positive team-relative marks and above-average through-contact numbers as such, particularly in relation to the 2023 season that we’ve already established wasn’t “good”), the Tiger offensive line was a decent unit. During his down final year, they were among the worst in the ACC, in the Power Five conferences at large, and even in the country as a whole.

While it’s true that team-relative efficiency metrics – especially those which are box count-adjusted – are designed to see through the muddied waters of how an offensive line of X quality might be effecting a player’s raw output, it’s also true that particular running backs might be better or worse suited (or prepared) to navigate the impacts of a porous run-blocking unit than others. With a guy like Shipley – a 5’11, sub-210-pound runner who wins with (as we’ll discuss more in a bit) speed and wiggle but who never posted great through-contact numbers – it makes sense that a significant dip in offensive line performance might cause him to suffer a proportional dip in his own per-carry output, especially when compared to someone more plainly built to withstand greater resistance at the line of scrimmage (like the 230-pound Mafah is, for example). For what it’s worth, Sports Info Solutions’ film-charting corroborates the PFF grades by indicating that 2023 saw the Clemson offensive line allow the highest rate of rushes gaining zero or fewer yards and the highest rate of rushes on which a runner was contacted at or behind the line of scrimmage of any of Shipley’s seasons with the team.

The theory that Shipley’s poor 2023 numbers are the result not of him sucking really bad but instead of his simply not being built for the sort of three-yards-and-oh-shit-I’ve-been-sandwiched-by-two-defensive-linemen work he was forced to endure more often last season is strengthened by (and actually, it came about in my mind because of) the results of the through-contact element of my film-charting process (crazy how our understanding of player performance increases when we watch them). On a sample of 166 touches across nine games against Power Five opponents from 2023, his ability to break free from or gain extra yardage through contact with defenders from each position group graded out well below average among studied backs, and his composite grade in that area came out as the fourth-lowest in that population (ahead of only TreVeyon Henderson, Chase Brown, and Deuce Vaughn). Against defensive linemen specifically, only the 179-pound Vaughn fared worse. Getting more than an arm on Shipley can generally be chalked up as a successful tackle attempt.

To me, this is a clear indication that greater defensive pressure at the line of scrimmage (whether by way of packed boxes or bad blocking) is enough to tank Shipley’s per-carry efficiency, almost regardless of whatever else he might be doing well back there. To the extent that such a dynamic precludes him from workhorse duty in a traditional, inside rushing attack (and I think it does), we can interpret it as an indictment on his overall game, but if we simply acknowledge that – like Jahmyr Gibbs or Austin Ekeler or James Cook or Tony Pollard – Shipley is not stylistically suited to such a role, we can then focus on his strengths and determine in what ways he can be successfully deployed in the NFL.

The most obvious strengths Shipley possesses are quickness and – by extension of it – elusiveness. His athletic testing performance can attest to the first of these, and my film-charting clearly reflects the second. He takes a decent amount of solid contact (his mark in Contact Solidity ranks 10th among 38 qualifying backs), but that’s less the result of a lack of wiggle more the result of the fact that he doesn’t dip into his bag of moves (which is impressively deep: he’s got a dead leg, a really fluid jump cut, a nice hesitation crossover move, and an explosive hurdle) that often; he’s actually a pretty tough runner who is willing to bang inside and churn his legs for extra yardage (though as we’ve already touched on, he’s – despite his willingness – just not particularly good at those things). When he does try to make someone miss, however, he’s often successful: his success rate on attempted evasive maneuvers is well above the population mean and puts him in the same ballpark as guys like Jonathon Brooks, Ray Davis, and Tyjae Spears. The best evidence of this ability is to just watch the man run:

I made reference earlier to “whatever else Shipley might be doing well” behind the line of scrimmage, and there’s a lot you can point to. Perhaps most notable is his tracking on both gap and zone runs, as he earns the fourth-highest grade among backs I’ve studied on each concept. He consistently presses close to the backs and hugs tight to the hips of his blockers in order to navigate interior trash, transition upfield on outside runs, and minimize the opportunities defenders have to catch him in no-man’s land, all with economy of movement and efficient use of space. This skill manifested with big-time rewards on this explosive run against North Carolina, and it’s something that Matt Waldman – with much greater technical specificity than I’m capable of – has made note of as well (in addition to the following clip, see: 1 and 2):

Shipley is also notably good in the related area of manipulating defenders out of position (something you can see on that run versus UNC), particularly on zone runs. He’s not just reading and going, he’s creating his own space by forcing defenders to commit to the hole he wants them to commit before then darting through the gap he actually wants to hit, a good indication of discipline, schematic understanding, and an ability to keep his mind working at the same pace that his body follows his instincts.

Both of those skills are things that Shipley has in common with Jaylen Wright, another explosive and slightly undersized back. Wright’s evaluation is made difficult by the fact that he ran into extremely light defensive fronts during his time at Tennessee, and – though to a lesser degree – that’s also somewhat true of Shipley, whose single-season high in average defenders in the box on his carries was the 6.42 he faced in 2022 (a 42nd-percentile mark among all collegiate backs and a number lower than the average box count seen by any 50+ carry NFL runner in at least the last three seasons). Shipley averaged just 1.62 yards and succeeded on just 31% of his 29 attempts against eight or more defenders in the box in 2023, at the same time that Power Five runners collectively averaged 3.68 yards and succeeded on 46.7% of their attempts in the same situations.

We’ve already established that Shipley probably isn’t going to make his way in the NFL by doing blue-collar work on crowded interior runs, though, and my point here is more about the translatability of lessons learned from his tape against relatively light collegiate fronts to what he’ll likely be asked to do at the next level. Compared to the almost coin-flip nature of our Wright evaluation, I think we can be a bit more confident with Shipley in this regard. The first reason for that is that – despite being light – the boxes he was running into weren’t so extremely light so as to provide almost no applicable insights for how he might fare in in-game situations in the NFL. The vastly different rates of neutrally-graded plays that I noted for Shipley and Wright serve as a decent illustration of this: where Wright earned a neutral vision grade from me on 73.3% of charted zone runs (easily the highest mark among backs I’ve studied), Shipley earned such a grade on 53.2% of those plays (a mark right at the population average). Accounting for all six of the decision-making categories that I grade on each play, Shipley actually posted the fourth-lowest rate of neutrally-graded zone plays among the 36 runners I’ve charted thus far. Put simply, he’s a high-impact decision-maker on zone concepts despite the fact that he regularly ran into relatively light defensive fronts (a factor that – as I’ve noticed in my film-study endeavors – often results in backs simply having to do less behind the line of scrimmage). Further, while those light defensive fronts mean we should be grading him on somewhat of a curve, Shipley did earn the second-highest overall zone grade of any back I’ve charted, so I’m pretty confident in his ability to make a positive impact on those plays (especially inside zone concepts, where he scored particularly well and on which a large portion of his total workload came). These skills don’t show up quite as much on gap concepts (though he’s more than comfortable running duo), but as Shipley’s rate of negatively-graded such plays is in the bottom quartile of studied backs, I think it’s fair to view him as a scheme-versatile runner at the next level.

This article is long enough already that I don’t feel the need to go into too much detail, but Shipley’s receiving skillset is also pretty nice (a perusal of this article reveals him to have run a varied route tree and commanded impressive volume, while his tape is littered with exciting examples of downfield ability – see: 1, 2, and especially 3). Given the dynamic he adds to an offense with those pass-catching traits on top of his high-end ability to navigate inside runs on long-down-and-distance situations, I think Shipley is one of the better third-down options in this running back class. He’s proven it against better competition than Blake Watson or Dylan Laube have, he’s provided a larger body of evidence for his abilities in that area than Jonathon Brooks or Trey Benson have, and I’d argue he’s a more dependable inside rushing option than Bucky Irving or MarShawn Lloyd (or Watson or Laube) are. That’s not to say I believe Shipley is a better player or prospect overall than the Brooks, Benson, or Lloyd types are (though I don’t think he’s super far behind), but if an NFL team is looking for a satellite back in this draft, Shipley can do that as well as anyone in the class and also offers some additional upside as a cerebrally-sound runner who may be able to grow into a three-down role.

The comps to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named are obviously lazy, but we don’t have to pretend they’re not also in the stylistic ballpark. I’ve seen similar parallels drawn between Shipley’s game and those of Duke Johnson, Jerick McKinnon, James Cook, and Danny Woodhead, all of which I can get on board with, but the one I’ve landed on is Austin Ekeler. Like Ekeler, Shipley is a versatile receiver whose undersizedness keeps him from being an ideal option for traditional and voluminous between-the-tackles work, but also like Ekeler, I can see a world in which Shipley’s general dependability earns him a sizable early-down role on a team that doesn’t care (or isn’t successful in their attempts) to supplement him with an archetypal inside runner. I’m certainly not predicting Ekeler-level fantasy numbers from him at the next level (and while I love Ekeler, let’s be honest: he was playing with house money as an elite satellite back who Peter Principled his way into becoming a ho-hum bellcow those last few years with the Chargers), but I think Shipley’s schematic understanding and clean decision-making skills give him more three-down upside than most of the Duke Johnson and Jet McKinnon types ever really had (I think his Clemson career in general is evidence of this: he succeeded mostly against light fronts and remained limited by a lack of power, but also was clearly capable of executing properly on a play-to-play basis). I’m a fan.