Lew
Nichols III.
Lew
Nichols III.
Central Michigan· 5'10"· 220 lb
"The nation's leading rusher one year and a three-and-a-half-yards-a-carry back the next, Nichols was a seventh-round bet that the 2021 tape still lived somewhere under all that mileage."Pre-draft read
Nichols is a thick, low-slung volume back who wins by wearing a defense down rather than running away from it. He presses the line square, keeps his pads under the second-level defender, and finishes almost every carry falling forward. On inside zone he is patient to the mesh, lets the double team build, and then plants and gets north without dancing.
The tape is heavy on contact balance and light on true burst. He runs through arm tackles at the line, spins out of ankle shots, and turns two-yard looks into four, but he rarely turns the corner on a fast edge defender or pulls away in the open field. He is a willing pass protector with the anchor to take on a blitzing linebacker, and he catches the ball cleanly on checkdowns.
Downhill gap or inside-zone run game that asks him to read one crease, plant, and finish forward rather than bend a run to the perimeter.
Year 1: fourth back and short-yardage/third-down protection body. Ceiling: early-down rotational starter who closes games with a lead.
Wide-zone offense that demands a hard bend and second-gear acceleration to the edge, or a spread scheme that splits its back out to threaten space.
His value lives between the tackles; the further from the guards he gets, the smaller the margin.
Nichols led the FBS in rushing in 2021 with 1,848 yards on 341 carries and 16 touchdowns, a workload that put him on every draft board in the MAC. The production was real, and so was the price: he took a beating over 13 games and never looked the same afterward.
His 2022 season was the evaluation problem. Playing through injury on a worse offensive line, he averaged 3.50 yards per carry on 176 attempts with six scores in nine games, a full two yards per carry below his breakout year. Scouts had to decide whether they were watching a damaged season or a back whose margin depends entirely on clean creases.
The projection was a late-round early-down runner with third-down value. He is dependable in protection, sure-handed as an outlet, and physical enough to close out a lead, but he does not offer the long speed or the lateral snap that lets a back manufacture yards behind a bad front. Teams valued the profile as a roster body, not a starter.
- 01
Contact balance
He runs through arm tackles at the line of scrimmage and consistently finishes forward, turning stuffed calls into manageable second downs.
- 02
Volume durability in 2021
He carried 341 times for 1,848 yards and 16 scores, leading the FBS in rushing without a drop in physicality late in games.
- 03
Pass protection
He squares up blitzing linebackers with a real anchor and rarely gets beaten by the first move, which is why he was trusted on third down.
- 04
Hands out of the backfield
He caught 40 balls for 338 yards in 2021, tracking swings and checkdowns cleanly rather than trapping them against his frame.
- 05
Vision on inside zone
He is patient to the mesh, lets the double team develop, and plants downhill without wasted lateral steps that cost the play its timing.
- 01
Long speed
He does not pull away from safety angles, and explosive runs die at the third level even when the crease was clean at the line.
- 02
Lateral quickness
He cannot cut a defender off in space, which limits him to gap and zone concepts where the read is a single decision.
- 03
2022 efficiency collapse
His yards per carry fell from 5.42 to 3.50 on 176 attempts, and the tape shows a back who was not moving like the year before.
- 04
Mileage
The 2021 workload was enormous for a MAC back, and evaluators were openly discounting the profile for wear before he ever got to a pro camp.
| Yr | Team | G | Att | Yds | TD | Rec | RecYds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Central Michigan | 6 | 78 | 508 | 4 | 10 | 109 |
| 2021 | Central Michigan | 13 | 341 | 1848 | 16 | 40 | 338 |
| 2022 | Central Michigan | 9 | 176 | 616 | 6 | 21 | 128 |
| Career | — | 28 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Honors
- 2021 FBS rushing leader (1,848 yards)
- 2021 MAC Offensive Player of the Year
- 2021 first-team All-MAC
- 2021 Sun Bowl champion
Physical between the tackles, useful in a rotation, but capped by the lack of separation speed at the second level.
Same thick frame and contact balance, with the pass-game trust that turned a Day 3 pick into a lead back.
Camp-body outcome where the college production never translates and the roster spot comes down to special teams value.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Nichols has yet to establish an NFL regular-season role. Green Bay reached an injury settlement with him in September 2023, ending his rookie year before it began, and his path since has run through practice squads. He remains an active running back with Pittsburgh.
There are two versions of this player on tape, and the honest evaluation lives between them. The 2021 Nichols is a genuine bell cow: ten 100-yard games, a Sun Bowl win carried on his shoulders, and a running style that made linebackers pay for every arrival. He was the best runner in his conference and it was not close.
The 2022 Nichols is a warning about how fast that kind of usage ages a body. The feet were slower to sort trash, the second gear stopped showing up, and the yards after contact that used to be free had to be earned twice over. A team taking him at the end of the seventh round was betting the 2021 back still existed under the mileage, and that the price of finding out was one roster spot in August. That is exactly the bet a 235th pick is supposed to be, and it is why the outcome — a rookie camp cut short by injury and years of practice-squad work — reads as normal rather than as a scouting failure.