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Running backs ruling college football
College football saw some star running backs capture the nation, such as Saquon Barkley, Kerryon Johnson and to a lesser degree the country’s leading rusher Rashaad Penny. All three of those, as well as USC’s Ronald Jones, Georgia’s dynamic RB duo and others have gone pro. Yet, I’m not sure when the NCAA has brought back so many talented running backs in recent history.
Bryce Love had the challenge of replacing Christian McCaffrey at Stanford and broke out in a crazy way. Like his former teammate, Love was the Heisman trophy runner-up, as well as winning the Doak Walker award for the nation’s top RB and Consensus All-American honours, as he rushed for 2118 yards and 19 TDs.
Love is a home-run hitter who averaged 8.1 yards per attempt and toughed out late-season injuries. Wisconsin’s Jonathan Taylor put up a freshman record 1977 rushing yards and 13 touchdowns. He offers a compact build with a low centre of gravity to rumble downfield and has better pull-away speed than you’d anticipate.
He reminds me a lot of Nick Chubb as a freshman, having that running style that tires out defenses and leads to his biggest runs coming later on in games. That led to just two games with less than five yards a clip. Another guy who received a lot of attention last season was Oklahoma’s, Rodney Anderson. It took Anderson a while to get going and take over the starting role for Oklahoma, but once he received more than ten touches per game from week seven one, Anderson averaged 166.6 yards and two touchdowns from scrimmage. He really started looking more and more like a young Beastmode, running with tremendous force and contact balance and he seemed to get stronger as the year went along.
There are so many guys, who nobody even talks about, but could have monster years in 2018. Most exciting for me is Ohio State’s J.K. Dobbins, who was held back a little by Mike Weber being ahead of him on the depth chart early on, but he still ended up reaching 1400 yards on the ground with less than 200 carries. His combination of explosiveness and power is off the charts. While he doesn’t quite have the same long-speed, he reminds me a lot of Zeke a few years back and as the lead-back I expect him to be in the Heisman conversation.
I haven’t even talked about Florida State’s Cam Akers, Boston College’s A.J. Dillon, FAU’s Devin Singletary, Oklahoma State’s Justice Hill, Washington’s Myles Gaskin, Iowa State’s David Montgomery, Kentucky’s Benny Snell and others yet.
