Rookie Profile: Samaje Perine, RB Oklahoma
When I was asked to write this profile, my word-for-word reply to Mr. Ryan McDowell was, “Oh, perfect. A guy I don’t like. It will be fun to run him down.” When I made the comment, I’d watched a couple games worth of film on Perine on Draft Breakdown and not much more. After working my way through another four games, including two each from 2014 and 2015, has my opinion changed? Read on to find out.
If you are unfamiliar with Perine’s career arc, he started as a house of fire back in 2014 during Joe Mixon’s suspension. Over the next couple of years, his counting and efficiency stats declined considerably. Mixon’s presence had a great deal to do with that, no doubt, but there may have been other forces at work as well.
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Statistics from sports-reference.com.
Pro Football Focus’ elusive rating charts missed tackles forced and yards gained after contact. In 2014 Perine ranked in the top ten in the country in the metric. 2015 saw that decline to 29th before giving way to a ranking of 87th this past season. My film review backs up PFF’s metric, as Perine looks to have had more lateral agility and, for lack of a better word, slipperiness in his early film. See for yourself:
In this game against Kansas, I don’t necessarily see a top-five dynasty rookie pick, but I do see a player capable of being a mid to low-end fantasy RB1. He shows just enough wiggle and burst to go with a punishing, physical style and displays good hands in the pass game. For whatever reason, much of this is gone two years later.
Watching these two games back to back had me scratching my head. I saw a running back who was either less agile or less interested in being agile, both at the point of contact and in the second level. In a weird way, Perine is ‘Opposite Jeremy Hill‘. In Hill’s rookie NFL season, he ran with physicality and purpose than in subsequent seasons where he consistently bounced runs, trying to play more like his teammate, Giovani Bernard. I’m not sure either of these big backs is any more or less talented than at earlier points in their career, but clearly something has changed for each.
One thing that is consistent for Perine is the one-speed nature of his running style. This isn’t a guy with a second gear. The speed he does have takes a moment to be reached, causing issues when he needs to make a cut before first contact. Nobody will mistake his first two steps for Christian McCaffrey’s.
Another issue that popped up over and over was a lack of vision. Perine seems to hit the initial hole fine, but when cutback lanes present themselves, he either doesn’t notice or can’t or won’t use them. There are myriad examples of him leaving yards on the field as he burrowed into a scrum, ignoring opportunity in favor of contact.
As I said earlier, Perine has soft, natural hands and is a willing, physical pass blocker. There are technique issues blocking and he is far too tight in the hips/heavy footed to be used creatively in the passing game, but Perine isn’t near the liability on third down many big backs are.
As you may suspect from the film, Perine did not have a banner day at the combine. His agility drills, 40 time, and broad and vertical jumps were all 38th percentile or lower. His short arms could make pass blocking a bit trickier against bigger, longer defenders.
The areas in which he did excel cater to his size. Perine’s 30 reps on the bench are 98th percentile. His weight and hand size put him up there with the biggest of the big. You could say they are tremendous. Yuge, even. Because of this yugeness, his weight adjusted speed score and SPARQ are both higher than his raw times/measurements would indicate.
Here are his Mock Draftable and Player Profiler pages:
I said at the top I came into this profile with a dim view of Perine as a prospect. I’ve seen some folks with him as high as the first round in their rookie rankings, something I found unthinkable. After digging into Perine more, I can see where those folks are coming from. They have that 2014 film in their heads and can’t get it out. While I appreciate that, and understand the player from those games may exist inside of him somewhere, I’m still not buying Perine anywhere inside my top-16. Keeping in mind this is being written before the draft takes place, I’d begin to consider him somewhere in the mid-second round. But if he winds up in an ideal situation (think Jordan Howard in Chicago last year), I am open to adjusting my ranking to as high as the 11-13 range.
As for a prognostication for Perine’s fantasy future, I see a running back who could post RB2 stats as the complement to a flashier speed type back. He is already probably a better partner for Giovani Bernard than Hill and could post numbers comparable to Isaiah Crowell alongside Duke Johnson. My ideal landing spots would be with the Jets, Ravens, Raiders, Giants, Eagles, Packers, or Lions. There is room in each of those backfields for a no-nonsense freight train to tote the ball 200 or so times, a role that would put Perine right into RB2 consideration.
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