With both on the Doak Walker watchlist, which of the Lawn Boyz will have a better season?

The Lawn Boyz, Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen, came to Happy Valley together. Singleton a five-star from Governor Mifflin High School in PA, Allen a four-star from IMG Academy in Florida, and as freshmen, they immediately led the Penn State offense. 

In 2022, coming off a 7-6 campaign, the duo combined for 1,928 rushing yards and 24 touchdowns with 1,061 coming from Singleton. They became the first freshmen Big Ten teammates in history to rush for 700 yards apiece and Penn State went 11-2 with a Rose Bowl victory over Utah. 

Singleton, the freshman sensation, averaged 6.8 yards per carry with nine rushes over 30 yards, the third most in the country. Yet, in 2023 while Penn State put together another 10-win season, Singleton took a big step back, finishing with just 752 rushing yards on 171 carries (4.4 yards per carry). His longest carry of the year went for just 24 yards in the final game of the regular season against Michigan State, and his teammate, Allen, was the superior back. 

Allen ran for 902 yards and six touchdowns in a Mike Yurcich offense that severely lacked explosive plays with Drew Allar at quarterback. Penn State still managed to average nearly the same yards per carry in 2023 as 2022 but fell from 34th in total offense to 55th. Following the late-season loss to Michigan, Yurcich was fired and in the offseason was replaced by former Kansas OC Andy Kotelnicki. 

Kotelnicki is known for having an innovative run game, one that should unlock both Singleton and Allen, and with the hype of their stellar freshmen seasons, both were still named to the Doak Walker Award watchlist in 2024, but which of the Lawn Boyz will have the better year. 

The problem with this exercise and the biggest question for Penn State’s entire season is which version of Nick Singleton is going to show up in Morgantown in Week 1. If it’s the version that broke off that 87-yard touchdown run in the Rose Bowl, then Penn State’s offense could be tough to slow down let alone stop, but if it’s last year’s Singleton, then Kotelnicki is better off leaning on Allen as his workhorse instead of a 50/50 split. 

Singleton began to look a bit more explosive in the latter part of the 2023 season. After Yurcich was fired, Ja’Juan Seider and Ty Howle, the interim co-offensive coordinators, found more creative ways to get the ball into his hands, like a screen pass he took for 53 yards against Michigan State. 

However, he still wasn’t able to beat the last defender, something that looked routine his freshman year. Is Singelton’s breakaway speed gone, or just temporarily missing? 

Another junior running back who had a historic freshman year in 2022 is asking the same questions, only he transferred to a new school to get the answer. QuinShon Judkins ran for 1,567 yards and 16 touchdowns as a freshman and averaged 5.7 yards per carry for Ole Miss, but in 2023 on basically the same number of carries (271 from 274 in 2022) Judkins finished with just 1,158 yards, with 15 more scores, but just a 4.3 yards per carry average. 

As a sophomore, though he put up 104 yards on Penn State in the Peach Bowl, Judkins lost much of his explosiveness. In 2022, 47.2% of his rushing yardage came on breakaway runs which PFF classifies as runs over 15+ yards. That ranked 23rd and in 2023 he fell to 128th at 27.5%, but Singleton had an even steeper decline. 

The Penn State freshman led the country in 2022 with a frankly unsustainably high 59.9% of his yardage coming on 18 breakaway runs. That’s 633 yards coming on just 18 carries, or 35.2 yards per carry, while on his other 138 carries, he averaged just 3.1 yards. Then, in 2023, he sunk to 140th in the nation with 22.4% of his yardage coming on just nine breakaways. That left him at 753 yards despite logging 15 additional carries and on his non-breakaway runs, he still averaged only 3.6 yards per carry. Without his explosiveness, Singleton just simply isn’t an effective player. 

Judkins is at Ohio State now, and with a similarly alarming trend after heavy workloads for his first two seasons of college football, is looking to split snaps with TreVeyon Henderson to decrease his workload and potentially regain his efficiency and burst. Singleton, however, doesn’t have that option because he’s already been in a time-share and has amassed 218 fewer carries than Judkins. 

Singleton’s lack of explosive plays severely hampered the Penn State offense, but it’s not just a lack of game-changing speed, he was just simply much easier to bring down as a sophomore. In 2022, Singleton averaged 4.58 yards after contract per carry. Among players with over 100 carries, that ranked third in college football, but in 2023 that number fell to 2.84 yco/a per PFF, which was 125th among a 159 player sample. 

Meanwhile, Allen equaled his freshman-year mark of 5.2 yards per carry and improved after contact, increasing his yco/a to 3.23 from 3.03. Allen also improved from a modest 25.7% of breakaway runs in 2022 to 30.4% in 2023. Simply put, he was tougher to tackle and tougher to catch as a sophomore. 

Despite his lack of efficiency on the ground, Singleton still outpaced Allen when it came to all-purpose yards, adding 308 on 26 receptions with two touchdowns through the air, while Allen caught just 14 passes for 81 yards and one score. 

So, for all the concerns about his sophomore slump, Singleton is still the safer bet to lead the Nittany Lions in rushing and all-purpose yards in 2024. Will he have an explosive season like 2022 with a nearly 60% breakaway percentage, certainly not, but his reality as a player likely lies somewhere in the middle and water always finds its level. 

There’s also the distinct possibility that he was dealing with a mid-season injury because from Week 9-12 he forced zero total missed tackles and racked up just 174 yards and one touchdown. But, in the final game of the regular season and the Peach Bowl, he totaled eight missed tackles with 169 rushing yards, one score, and averaged 6.5 yards per carry. 

That late-season uptick provided hope that Singleton will return to form in 2024, which coupled with a steadily improving Kaytron Allen, could produce one of the most impactful backfields in the country, and carry Penn State to the College Football Playoff.