Where some coaches might see a logjam and worry about distributing the workload, Notre Dame running backs coach Deland McCullough, earlier this year promoted to the role of Fighting Irish’s running game coordinator, instead sees job applicants.
See, McCullough – a prominent 2022 member of FootballScoop’s Minority Rising Stars list and former NFL assistant – doesn’t pay lip-service to talk of balancing a workload among running backs.
“I sell it with jobs,” McCullough explained this spring. “I have a thing where I post running back jobs, and they know out of these eight or nine jobs, it’s not going to be one guy doing them.
“It’s going to be three or four guys.”
Sure, the Fighting Irish return their leading rusher, Audric Estime, from 2022 on the heels of Estime’s 920-yard break-out campaign. And they are poised to bring back redshirt-freshman Jadarian Price – whom coaches universally said would have been a factor last fall had he not suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon in summer drills.
Second-year back Gi’Bran Payne made his own moves during the Irish spring camp that wrapped up in late-April, and incoming running back Jeremiyah Love was the nation’s No. 5-ranked running back recruit, per the industry-standard 247Sports Composite.
Oh, Chris Tyree – who’s flashed plenty out of the Irish backfield – returned for his senior season, and while Tyree worked in the slot throughout spring, he’s got more than 1,100 career rushing yards.
Just last week, McCullough and Notre Dame landed Penn State graduate-transfer running back Devyn Ford – the former consensus four-star prospect from the 2019 signing class.
McCullough doesn’t fill his meeting room with bluster; he shows his troops the evidentiary results of his approach.
“I would show them the previous statistics of places that I’ve been; it is what it is,” said McCullough, who won a Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs three years ago and has emerged as a legitimate head-coaching candidate at the collegiate level per industry insiders. “Then when we got here, and guys actually saw it, I think they wondered at first but then they just continue to see how it unfolded and opportunities came. Packages. Things where we’re using this guy that way, and that guy this way. Then they got to definitely see how the (2022) season played out and I used that in recruiting.
“And guys are like, ‘Wow!’ It’s easy out recruiting to talk about what the starting guy did, that’s easy; 1,200 yards. But what did the next guy have? The next guy had 500 yards. The next guy had 80 yards. That ain’t the case here. Our third guy had over 800 yards’ offense. And we want to continue to build on that. With the enhancement of the passing game and what we’re doing within that, there will be more opportunity for explosives from some of these running backs.”
McCullough explains his job-based approach.
“You’ve got the starter, evidently. You got the backup, that’s obvious,” said McCullough, one of several Irish assistants pursued this past offseason but who remained in Marcus Freeman’s Notre Dame program. “But then I’ve got a third-and-3-to-6, a third-and-7-plus, you’ve got a two-minute guy, a four-minute guy, a short-yardage guy and a goal-line guy; you’ve got a gadget guy. So a guy who can be a jet sweep or route-runner guy.
“Then you’ve got your two-back, to me, whenever we go two-back, the way I envision it is, the two-back isn’t necessarily the starter or the backup. So we could be in a two-back situation where you’ve got Gi’Bran and you’ve got JD in. Where you got JD and Jeremiyah (Love) in. So you’ve got packages, stuff that every guy can hold on to. And if I’m doing my job, every one of those guys is always ready to play. That’s the whole goal.”
Ultimately, for McCullough, the whole approach is single-minded despite its variety of implements.
“There’s got to be some guy to start, I get that, but there’s got to be packages where you can start utilizing things guys can do to help us win games on Saturdays,” he said.