Ollie Gordon Escaped Mike McDaniel. Omarion Hampton Is Still Waiting.

In Mike McDaniel’s offense, Ollie Gordon II averaged 2.8 yards a carry. Out of it, he’s averaging 5.0. Now McDaniel coaches another power back, the Chargers’ Omarion Hampton, and Hampton is struggling the same way.

The Dolphins are 0-5, and almost nothing about their season has gone right. Their second-year running back is the exception. Since De’Von Achane went down in Week 3, Gordon has taken over the backfield and turned into one of the league’s most efficient runners.

The other big change is on the sideline. Mike McDaniel, fired in January, built his Miami backfields around small, fast backs. The new staff has handed the ball to a 225-pound power back and leaned on the gap run scheme that suits him.

The breakout

Gordon has gone from one of the least productive runners in the league to one of the most productive.

Ranks are among running backs with 50+ carries in 2025 and 40+ in 2026.

The change is in how often he gets stopped. He’s getting stopped for no gain or a loss about half as often and breaking long runs more than twice as often. His 100-yard game at Minnesota, on only nine carries, was the first of his career and the first by any back against the stout Vikings defense since Week 12 of last season.

A gap runner from the start

Gordon arrived in Miami as one of the most decorated backs in college football. In 2023 at Oklahoma State, he led the nation with 1,732 rushing yards and 21 touchdowns at 6.1 yards a carry. He won the Doak Walker Award as the country’s best running back and was a unanimous All-American and the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year.

That season came right after Oklahoma State leaned into gap blocking. Mike Gundy’s teams had long been built on zone blocking, but in the offseason before 2023 the Cowboys’ offense “worked heavily on gap scheme run concepts.”

Scouts saw the same fit. “Zone schemes won’t be the best fit, but a man/gap/power scheme would be a great fit,” read one pre-draft profile. After a quieter 2024, he fell to the sixth round, 179th overall, and landed in McDaniel’s zone offense.

McDaniel’s speed-back habit

In four seasons in Miami, McDaniel built his backfield around small, fast backs. Every back who got a quarter or more of the Dolphins’ running back carries was listed at 212 pounds or less.

It worked for those backs. Mostert led the NFL with 18 rushing touchdowns in 2023, and Achane led all backs with 100+ carries in yards per carry in 2023 and 2025. But it left little room for Gordon, the biggest of Miami’s backs, who only played 22% of the snaps as a rookie.

What changed: More power runs for a power back

Under McDaniel, zone made up more than half of the Dolphins’ runs every year from 2023 to 2025, according to one season-by-season breakdown. Under new head coach Jeff Hafley and offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik, the Dolphins have leaned more on gap runs, the kind Gordon was built for.

The two schemes ask different things of a running back. In zone, the line moves together in one direction and the back reads the defense, picking a lane as it opens. In gap, or man/gap, blockers pull and kick out defenders to build a specific hole, and the back hits it without waiting.

The new staff has also handed Gordon the backfield. He has 49% of Miami’s running back carries this year, up from 19%. Achane’s injury opened the door, but the staff has built the run game around the back who walked through it.

Case study: Omarion Hampton

McDaniel landed in Los Angeles as the Chargers’ offensive coordinator, and his lead back there is exactly the kind he rarely used in Miami. The Chargers drafted Omarion Hampton, listed at 220 pounds, 22nd overall in 2025 to be their lead back. A year and a half later, he ranks in the bottom third of the league’s running backs.

His rookie season was cut short. He hurt his ankle in Week 5, spent two months on injured reserve and finished with 545 yards on 124 carries, 4.4 a carry. This season has been worse: 289 yards on 80 carries, 3.6 a carry, 28th of 40 backs with 40+ carries. He was held under 3 yards a carry against Denver (2.4) and Kansas City (2.6).

The scheme is a big part of it. Across 2025 and the start of 2026, Hampton averaged 5.33 yards a carry on man/gap runs and 3.06 on zone, per Fantasy Points Data. The league averages were 4.48 and 4.36. Among backs with 40+ zone carries, only Houston’s Woody Marks was worse on zone runs. On gap runs, 53% of Hampton’s carries kept the offense on schedule; on zone runs, only 40% did.

McDaniel is running the Chargers like Miami. He brought his wide-zone run game to Los Angeles, and the Chargers now run more zone than they did a year ago. That’s the scheme where Hampton has struggled most.

His role is shrinking. Hampton still leads the Chargers’ backfield, but he played 58% and 63% of the snaps in the first two weeks. Since then it’s been 30–50%, and his carries have fallen from 23 in Week 2 to 7 in Week 6. McDaniel has split the backfield with Kimani Vidal and Keaton Mitchell, a 191-pound speed back in the Achane mold, and given them most of the zone runs. Mitchell is the kind of quick, one-cut runner a zone scheme is built for. McDaniel still says he hasn’t “lost any faith” in Hampton.

Still waiting

A year ago, Gordon was the power back McDaniel barely used: 19% of Miami’s running back carries, at 2.8 yards a carry. An injury, a new staff, and a gap-heavy plan turned him into one of the league’s most efficient runners within a month. Now Hampton is the one in those shoes.

With the Chargers 0-6 and their season looking bleak, the hope in Los Angeles is that Hampton escapes the same fate, whether McDaniel learns to build around a power back or someone else is calling the runs next year. Gordon is the proof of what a power back can do in an offense built for him.

Sources: play-by-play and snap counts from nflverse (CC BY 4.0) and Pro Football Reference. Hampton’s zone and gap split from Fantasy Points Data. Other reporting is linked in the story.