Vision And Usage
Of course, there is a lot more to being a successful ballcarrier than what you are able to do to tacklers with ball in hand, with the ability to work through blocking schemes and the fit in the offense scheme overall. First, let’s start with Scarlett’s vision.
His elementary vision is really good. By that, I mean if he sees a player running down the gap in front of him trying to tackle him, he does a good job of not just running into him, with ability to make a cut and hit an adjacent rushing lane:
Where he sometimes struggles, however, is when the best rushing lane is not one directly in front of him. What I mean by this is when he’s rushing to the strong side, such as on the following play and the defense all shifts over to fill their gaps, he has a tendency to hesitate and just drive headlong into the mess:
You can see him stop his feet here, as he recognizes that where he wants to go isn’t going to work, but whereas the best running backs would recognize this a little earlier and simply put their foot in the ground immediately and just take what is there, he never really showed the ability to do this. On a positive note, however, he also doesn’t do what some do by looking to cut it back completely and find a rushing lane outside the structure of the offense, as while this can lead to some big plays, it can also lead to a lot of TFLs.
Finally, from a vision point of view, he doesn’t do an amazing job of manipulating rushing lanes. On the following play, he does a nice job of sidestepping the initial defender, but fails to recognize how this creates an inside running lane and instead just charges into the second defender. There is a chance that this is less of a vision issue and more an agility one, but either way he doesn’t show much ability to create yardage in this way:
The issue this creates for the Panthers in particular is how it affects the way in which Scarlett is used. At Florida, he was used out of the shotgun in various ways as well as out of the I-formation and while the Panthers do mix the way in which they look to run the ball, they expect their ball carriers to be able to run effectively from any formation.
What is clear from tape, however, is that Scarlett fares much better running the ball out of the I than he does from the shotgun, especially when lined up directly alongside the quarterback. While his intermediate speed is very good, as shown earlier, he doesn’t get up to speed that quickly over his first few steps, and without the elite vision to manipulate defenses at low speed, gaps closed on him far too frequently given the speed of the college game:
If the Panthers want to get the best out of Scarlett as a rusher, they need to be willing to focus his carries on plays out of the I-formation, where they can make the most of his ability to hit the line and speed:
There are issues with this, as this does limit some of what they will want to do schematically, and on plays where they really want to operate out of the shotgun it will be hard to put Scarlett on the field, but there have been players taken far, far higher than Scarlett who have also struggled to operate outside of the I formation.
Up Next: How Scarlett is Similar To CMC —- Is He?
