re: What’s up with Caden Durham?

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Dead on, he has all the physical traits but lacks the most important thing “vision”

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I made a similar comment on vision but in thinking more about it I dont know how his "vision" is in Lane's running game. We ran some version of zone read all the damn time and the QB never ran the ball so every RB we had ran into a wall of defenders.

Here is to something different this season!

TIL Durham is still at LSU.

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I don't think his vision is that poor. I just think he doesn't have great explosive traits or elite speed.

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Its literally the opposite. You need to actually look at his history. He doesn't get a lot of 4-5 yard runs on a consistent basis. He created a lot of explosive plays in the run and pass game.

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Then you see a guy like Jeremy Hill. He didn't have an elite 40 time (he ran a 4.6 at the combine). However, DBs and LBs rarely ran him down from behind.

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Situations are not the same. Jeremy Hill was in a pro-style offense and majority of those "long runs" were out of 21 or 12 personnel and against a heavy box (7-8 defenders). Therefore if you broke through the first level and made the first guy miss you were clear to the endzone. Jeremy Hill did have very good top end speed as well but all of Caden's big runs except for the run last year against Florida were in spread formations 11 or 10 personnel with lighter boxes so he was having more defenders deep to try and out-run. If you look at his '24 season he was creating explosive plays on very good clip and his top end speed was still very good. But was slightly less than '24. Now that could be because he had less long runs where he could get out the gates or could be from being nicked last season.

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Extremely fast? I remember him getting hawked down by one of the smaller tier opponents.

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He had a breakaway vs Vandy and got caught inside the 5 IIRC. We still couldn’t punch it in for a TD
The 2025 offense was allergic to the endzone

He hasn't quite been the same since the weird endzone injury 2 years back. He looked great prior to that.

I don't really agree that Kiffin and Weiss will incorporate lots of different backs. At Ole Miss, they really liked to feature a guy as the bell cow RB, even before Lacy.

FWIW, I thought this was going to be a big year for Durham to bounce back and build on what we saw in 2024.

He was never the same after Miles Frazier fell and rolled up on his ankle

That was the most atrocious offensive line play I have seen since the late 90s. If the 'vision' is every lane closed and two of your blockers are pancaking air, of course he's going to look bad. I couldn't tell you how many but it was often that some carries for no gain were actually blown up in the backfield and the runner just out-talented the defense to get back to the line of scrimmage.

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He was looking really good on the runs LSU Football just posted at least.

The big hits from Delane(13) & Jhase Thomas(28) stood out though.

He looks slow because he doesn't have vision. Has nothing to do with losing a step. He was never fast on LSU's campus in football pads. Runs a great track time but when he's bursting on the football field he has never looked fast even his freshman year. When you're complacent to hit holes, you look slow. His issue is vision because as bad as OL was last year it opened holes up for him he wasn't taking. He got better second half last year but overall he missed a lot of easy big 20 yard runs with one cut running straight into his OL.

I can see his role being kinda like Josh Williams, the do everything get the tough yards back