"I Want to be the Next Ahmad Hardy"
Three star Louisianan D'Shaun Ford didn't mince words when he committed to Bryant Vincent and the ULM program on Saturday; his plan? Start as a freshman, ball out, transfer, be the next Ahmad Hardy...
Where I'm from, Bastrop, Louisiana, you played football, basketball, and baseball; you ran track - and that was about it.
- Ronnie Coleman, bodybuilder
Picture this: you come up through the ranks coaching high school ball in the state of Alabama. You do it successfully enough that you get noticed by one of the local FBS colleges, they call you up to coach TEs. You eventually work your way to the QB position, then OC of a neighbouring program in Birmingham. That school shuts down its program after your first season. Shit. Back to the original spot—Southern Alabama—to coach QBs and call the offence again. Another successful tenure.
Now the other school is calling you back because they’ve just restarted their football program two years later under the legendary Bill Clark, who also happens to be your mentor. Clark retires after four seasons and you're named interim head coach at UAB. Once again, another winning season and—more importantly—a fatass pig in the backfield by the name of DeWayne McBride who absolutely crushes it in CFF.
You assume the job is yours; after all, Alabama football is in your blood at this point. Only to find out one fine winter morning that some wanker named Trent Dilfer—who’s still trading off of the reputation from his haphazard performance during Baltimore’s Super Bowl run in the early 2000s—will be getting the job that you’ve coveted for the last half decade. Ouch.
No biggie—you play that team this year with your current program. You smash those wankers with a star freshman tailback and a surprisingly effective offensive line. You run the football. You run it well. Your star player gets so many accolades this season that he decides to bolt at the end of the year for greener pastures. Now what?
The man I’m talking about today is one Bryant Vincent, current head coach of ULM, formerly of New Mexico and of course, UAB and Southern Alabama. ULM has a tall task this year in year two of Bryant Vincent’s tenure—shoot, they’re going to have a tall task every year in the NIL/portal era, aren’t they?
This is the type of team that is going to have to replace its best players every year, and they know that. This year the task will be replacing the aforementioned star RB and Mississippi native, Ahmad Hardy, who defected to Ole Miss this offseason. Enter three star RB D’Shaun Ford.
I don’t believe that there are any coincidences in this life, so when I saw a #22 toting the rock in Louisiana who had just committed to ULM in early January—a player with supposed offers from Alabama, LSU & Ole Miss, among others—I thought this kid might be in the right place at the right time. Just to be clear, there’s next to no chance Ford actually held commitable offers from those programs, but it is a good sign of P4 interest.
Hardy, who ULM is replacing, was an unranked #22 coming out of Mississippi last year. The two players look similar on tape, but Ford looks to be playing at a higher level of competition relative to his predecessor in high school
My hunch about what the plan would be here was further validated when I saw Ford’s comments shortly after he committed. As reported by ON3’s Steve Wiltfong, Ford’s intentions this upcoming season are pretty clear:
C'est la vie as a head coach of a football program in the G5, huh? What a recruiting pitch: come here, play early, increase your stock, get P4 interest, get paid. If that doesn’t show you how far CFB has changed since its inception, I don’t know what will.
And while this sort of thing might not be ideal for the health of the sport, it is a good thing in the CFF context. Particularly in re-draft formats. Ahmad Hardy started literally from snap one last year as a true freshman. He wasn’t the only frosh to do so in 2024. It would be particularly great in dynasty leagues if some of these G5s would stay where they are, but such is no longer a reasonable reality.
What is a reasonable reality is that this kid, currently still in high school, could very much be not only a CFF-relevant player, but a CFF stud à la Hardy in 2025. The first component in this analysis, as always, is the patterns of the staff.
Coaching & System
RB1 PPG AVERAGE — HC: 17.71 (half ppr)
The aforementioned Bryant Vincent is the lead man at ULM, and he calls the plays on offence. That’s good news for us, because this guy is a killer in the CFF context. There is a long list of productive pigs in his backfield everywhere he goes, and I’d expect 2025 to be no different.
I already mentioned UAB rusher DeWayne McBride, who was a back-to-back 1000 yard rusher under Vincent from 2021-2022. The 2020 season was obviously a strange one but lead runner Spencer Brown had a good year, averaging over 100 yards and a score per game in eight appearances.
The 2019 season looked to be an aberration as despite the fact that another back-to-back 1000 yard rusher, Spencer Brown, played in 12 games, he only saw 150 carries, amassing 566 yards. On further inspection, it appears Brown was dealing with injury throughout that season.
As mentioned, Brown ran for over 1000 yards in 2017 and 2018, the latter year coming under Vincent’s tutelage. Curiously, during Vincent’s time at Southern Alabama (2015-2017), the rushing success, or touch concentration, just wasn’t there. However, in his sole season as OC at UAB (2014) just before shutting down their program, Vincent’s lead pig, Jordan Howard, carried the ball 306 times for 1587 yards and 13 scores.
During his only season as New Mexico’s head coach, the Lobos’ RB1 Jacorey Merritt ran for 1190 yards and 17 TDs, averaging 19.8 PPG in PPR formats. And of course, this past year Ahmad Hardy led Vincent’s Warhawks with 1352 yards and 13 scores on 237 carries. Hardy had multiple 200 yard games as well as multiple 30 carry games. Suffice to say, he was exactly what you’d hope for in a true freshman starter in the CFF context.
That’s a lot of rushing success under Vincent over the last decade. When looking at his play calling tendencies, what he wants to do on offence is clear: run the football. His teams average a 62/38 split in favour of the ground game. His offences typically move slower than the average FBS team from a seconds per play and plays per game standpoint. That’s not unusual for a run-first team.
D’Shaun Ford (5’11, 218)
My first thought when getting a glimpse of this kid was “this kid looks like he’s related to Ronnie F***ing Coleman”. Ford, pictured on the right, announced his commitment to ULM at the Navy All-American Bowl over offers from Tulsa, Louisiana Tech and Central Arkansas. He mentioned head coach Bryant Vincent as a key reason why he committed.
Me and Coach Vincent, I went in his office and we sat down and talked. I like the culture he’s building. He’s turning the program around. I want to be part of history.
Everything he told I think is real. He said he’s going to make me a player and make me a man too.
Once again, ON3’s reporting claims that Ford had significant P4 interest:
Ford at one point in his process had offers from the likes of Alabama, LSU, Auburn, Ole Miss, Missouri and USC. He looks forward to proving himself at Louisiana-Monroe.
It sounds like he might have legitimately had some SEC/B1G offers early on but lost them.
Asked what he brings to the ULM program, Ford said:
They’re getting a hard worker. I want to be the next Ahmad Hardy.
His trainer, (unsurprisingly) provided a glowing endorsement of Ford as well:
“D’Shaun is one of the most humble, hard-working kids you’ll ever meet,” his trainer Clyde Alexander of Edge Assassins said. “He’s a way better athlete than he’d like to admit. He’s not like most skill players. He doesn’t say much. He’s quiet. When you see him play on the field amongst anybody else he always stands out.”
“From a football standpoint he finishes his runs,” Alexander said. “He’s going to get that hard yardage. He’s a traditional-style running back. The kid is going to go to ULM and be the starter and be the bell cow and see where his career goes from there. When it comes to him and his ability I don’t question anything the kid can do.”
That’s a lot of confidence, and I have no doubt that what Alexander suggests at the end there is the plan for Ford and his camp. Whether or not it actually comes to fruition, however, is another matter. These things aren’t guaranteed, no matter how many times you say them out loud. At the end of the day, the player has to be good enough to make it happen.
247 Sports provided some background on the athlete:
TRACK & FIELD
Limited junior reps included a 23.99 200 and a 40-7 shot put, per MileSplit.
As a sophomore, ran 100-meter times of 11.82 and 11.85, along with a 23.10 200.
Ran freshman 100-meter time of 11.53 in April 2022.
-----
FOOTBALL
2023: Played a major role as a junior in Opelousas' Louisiana Division II Non-Select state championship season and 11-4 record.
2022: As a sophomore, earned Louisiana Sports Writers Association 4A all-state honorable mention honors. Named first-team offense at running back on The Acadiana Advocate's All-Metro Big School team. Ran for about 1,300 yards and 22 TDs. Helped Opelousas to a 10-3 record and a Louisiana Division II Non-Select third-round playoff appearance.
If you run a sub-11 100 meter, then you’re fast. 11.53 is not bad, but he’s not going to be winning a lot of track meets on the field. Similar to Hardy, this kid will make his bread in breaking tackles and leaving more lettuce on the field than your local vegetarian grocer.
Similar to last year’s top two freshman runners in the SBC, Ford is coming in with a lot of production in high school. That’s always a good sign, but not the be-all-end-all. True freshman stud Nate Frazier split carries at Mater Dei, for example. I do think at a lower level of football though this prior production is a good indicator. At the very least, it is an indicator that the player can handle a workload.
Part of the problem with being a bellcow is that the touches begin to erode your body over time. I joke a lot about volume on this newsletter but the reality is there is a catch-22 to the relationship between touches and production in CFF. Durability, I think, is an underrated component to CFF success.
The above linked highlights appear to be from a championship game at the high school level. The below linked highlights of what looks to be a regular season game give off a similar vibe to Hardy’s high school highlights, whose inventory also consisted of individual game cutups in what looked to be played in the middle of nowhere.
Closing
It’s always a wildcard when predicting what true freshmen are going to do in CFB. The 2024 season offered encouraging signs to what might be a trend going forward, but we have a sample size of one at the moment. So, while there were a lot of true freshmen breakouts last year, I remain skeptical that 2025 will be the same. Or at least, I’d like to see a few years of this repeating itself before declaring in some grand fashion that this is just the way it’s going to be from now on (B1G stans/SEC haters may want to heed this advice as well).
True freshmen players being as relevant as they were in CFF last year is a new phenomenon, but it helps that in this case we can at least see what the intention of the player is, and presumably the staff of ULM were aware of this intention when recruiting him. That’s a good place to start when looking for potential frosh breakouts in my opinion. Communication is key, after all. ◾
If you enjoyed this content and would like to read more, I recommend joining the Pigpen, a community of thousands of degenerate college football fans:
Sample from 2018-2024.