STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- By the end of the longest college football season in history, two pairs of running back teammates had crossed the quintessential position threshold of 1,000 yards gained in a single campaign. One of those duos left Columbus, Ohio, following a national championship to embark on NFL careers this fall. The other is here, on a sleepy Wednesday in late July, doing important but mundane things at the Lasch Football Building.
There is physical testing to establish mileposts before Penn State officially begins practice. There is a confab with their new position coach. There's an audience with a visitor in a meeting room, which, like most everything else, the pair handles together and with a premium on syllables spoken.
Notably, there is no slate of appearances for various media outlets and league stakeholders inside a casino. The program has sent its starting quarterback, Drew Allar, along with a center and a safety to the day's Big Ten media day carnival appearance in Las Vegas. This tracks: A defining dynamic of college football in 2025 is Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton being here, and not somewhere else.
And, here, they might have the most successful season a modern college running back can possibly have. They give Penn State's own national championship talk its legs while having, most likely, no chance to win a Heisman Trophy. They might end up occupying the top two spots on their school's all-time rushing chart while ending up without any official recognition as the best player at his position in college football this year. While the Nittany Lions will lean into formational creativity and dispatch Allen and Singleton to the field at the same time, to do different things, most of the time it's one or the other and not both.
And that's exactly the point. Lots of yards and fewer hits. Diversified skill sets and limited exposure. A year for the ages in college without sacrificing years when they're aging in the pros. Juxtaposition at one position, on purpose.
Here sits the archetype for a college backfield, literally side-by-side. They can't be in each other's way if everything they want is in front of them.
"He pushes me, and I push him," Allen says. "That's all that matters, for real."
An acknowledgement: Elite tandems at the running back position are nothing new.
College football's history is rooted in mythological backfields of old -- Notre Dame's Four Horsemen, Army's Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside -- and contemporary examples have powered the sport's recent juggernauts. Reggie Bush and LenDale White gave Pete Carroll's USC its flash and power from 2003 to 2005. In 2017, Nick Chubb and Sony Michel helped Georgia to a national championship appearance, which the Bulldogs lost to an Alabama team with two future first-round picks at the position in Josh Jacobs and Najee Harris, neither of whom started.
None of them played in an era when staying was harder than going.
Across four years of prep football, Allen and Singleton combined for nearly 11,000 yards rushing. They arrived at Penn State from different places -- Allen refined via three seasons at IMG Academy, Singleton going the traditional route at a large Pennsylvania high school -- with the same upbringing: They did not have to share much, if at all. They were playmakers. They were given the ball, a lot.
Going on a budget, from there, is not easy. A running back might make that read and juke right out of town to another program. Allen and Singleton have endured and thrived in the same spot, and chose to continue to do so when they could be in NFL training camps at this very moment, like Ohio State's TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins, the only other pair of running backs to top the 1,000-yard mark together in the transfer-portal era. That has a lot to do with friendship and history and, yes, the ability to profit as a college player.
It's also a telling acknowledgement that, at least at this position in this time, less can amount to much more. "You got two guys that want the same thing," Penn State running backs coach Stan Drayton says. "It can be a bad deal, right? But you make them understand that there's going to be enough reps, enough touches that they're going to both get to complement each other. They're going to keep their tread on the tires for each other. And they're both going to eat."
A backfield timeshare, especially one featuring two All-America-level players, does seem like an arrangement college offenses should follow in 2025 if the idea is ensuring the near-and-long-term success of said players. But it is not the only way.
We know this due to what happened in 2024, when Ashton Jeanty recorded a nation-high 374 carries for Boise State, finished second in the Heisman Trophy balloting and got drafted sixth overall by the Las Vegas Raiders. In 2025, Notre Dame's Jeremiyah Love might be the closest approximation to anything like that, as The Athletic's No. 6 overall pro prospect and the first back off the board in The Athletic's recent Heisman Trophy Fantasy Draft. But even Love didn't record more than 16 carries in a single game as a sophomore. While his 10 carries in a season-opening loss at Miami are currently a point of consternation, there's nevertheless no plan to grind him into turf pellets even if he's possibly the best at his position in program history.
Notre Dame undoubtedly needs Love to be great in order to be great, period. But Love being great also means Love being available. "Being able to play all game, every game, to me is a successful season," Irish running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider says. "I don't put a number on what the stat line is. Because if (Love) is healthy, I think that stat line is going to be high."
The workhorse is not dead, though he looks a little more like a unicorn. Math is math. More carries mean more opportunities for contact. More contact means more vulnerability to injury, minor or otherwise. Injuries, accumulated over time, can whittle years off a career. If there is a path to minimizing exposure while maximizing production and preserving earning potential, even if it means watching award ceremonies from home, it's probably worth following.
This assumes, of course, that you can get players accustomed to being the center of the universe to recognize the other stars in orbit.
The prevailing line at Penn State is that Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton didn't need to buy in. They always bought in.
In it together, from the start, as 2022 enrollees thrust into the same spaces on the field and off of it (they're still roommates four years on). Evidence to support the claim is circumstantial and a little apocryphal, but it does exist. Singleton remembers one grueling sled-pushing session before their freshman season and feeling very much like he didn't have enough left to get the apparatus across the finish line. Allen then got in his ear and made sure he did. That fall they each broke the Penn State freshman record for rushing touchdowns -- first Singleton, then Allen. Most significantly in the age of roster flux and NIL chasing, neither sought a greater share elsewhere.
It has been a little bit of anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better all along, but probably closer to anything-he-can-do-I-can-do-too in the final appraisal.
"Everybody comes from different things," Allen says. "Everybody's struggles are different. So everybody's life is different. But it's about, how can we come together to help each other get to where we want to be, as brothers? Of course we're competing. But at the end of the day, we're brothers."
"Early on in practice, they had a couple viral clips where Kaytron is running over players and stuff like that, and Nick feels like he's gotta go make a play," assistant running backs coach Charles Walker says. "It's just day in and day out. And they've done it on such a big stage every week. You don't know if you're gonna ever be around it again."
Still, there has to be a reason to add to a combined 1,058 carries and 5,789 yards of tread at the college level, and getting compensated for the effort only goes so far. That spigot will shut off and the next one doesn't turn on without a good reason to. Time, for a running back, is too valuable a commodity to misallocate.
So what Penn State offered Allen and Singleton in 2025 is something like a post-graduate year, an immersion in an MFA program: Master of Football Arts.
Much of the structure was familiar. Their first year in offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki's scheme was a rousing success, not least because Kotelnicki had a couple decades of experience with two-back rotations at both Buffalo and Kansas while concluding, almost before he arrived, that Allen and Singleton both needed the ball. That required diversifying their skill sets so they could get those touches in as many ways as possible while also spending a decent amount of time on the field together. "You can't just take another running back, put 'em on the field and the only thing you do is line them up right next to the quarterback," Kotelnicki says. "You need to be able to move them."
So they'd set to work on route-running and blitz pickup and lead blocking and more -- extra work on the JUGS machine post-practice was a new habit. In the end, Singleton led the Big Ten in all-purpose yards (1,805) while Allen amassed 1,205 of his own.
As it happens, running backs who can do a lot more than one thing are attractive to NFL roster constructors. At Penn State, the plan wouldn't change in 2025; the coaching staff more or less takes regular votes to establish a hierarchy for offensive touches, and Allen and Singleton remain atop the list.
If anything, a year of data and experience would help soup up the vehicle. The finer Allen and Singleton's skills, the more elaborate Kotelnicki could get in his scheming. "How much I've been able to put on their plate and how they've handled it -- it's been really impressive," Kotelnicki says. "Like, we've been doing some sh -- with them."
Head coach James Franklin's solution to a potential stick in the spokes -- running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider taking the job at Notre Dame a month after Allen and Singleton announced they'd come back to Penn State -- was an old head who could lean into NFL-like structures and demands and create an enticing value for a couple of players who had reason to expect it upon their return.
Stan Drayton was available after a three-seasons-and-out tenure as Temple's head coach and three decades with running back instruction as his primary medium. Previous experience with high-level two-back rotations at Ohio State and Texas, plus a pair of stops as an NFL assistant, recommended him as a hire who could create some constructive discomfort for a pair of established stars.
Almost immediately, Drayton identified nuanced flaws. Allen and Singleton absorbed too many hits from safeties. They weren't identifying blitzers quickly enough to meet them at the line of scrimmage. And so on. The critiques might've sent Allen and Singleton's eyebrows to the ceiling. But Drayton had done this before, with Ezekiel Elliott and Carlos Hyde at Ohio State and Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson at Texas. The Penn State stars knew those names. So they knew enough to listen.
"No one is perfect," Singleton says. "You're always trying to find ways every year to get better. Calling us out for all that just shows there's still work to be done."
Drayton has required them to pick up a dry-erase marker, walk to the front of the meeting room and draw up plays he calls out. It unnerves and challenges a pair of accomplished players in a productive way. "Right now," Drayton says, "they are being trained to be coordinators."
It demands they know the roles and responsibilities of all 11 players in the formation, and how a defense might react to them, which should speed up their in-game information-processing ... and thereby potentially reduce wear-and-tear if they can predict who's coming from where.
And yes, it's what NFL front offices will expect Allen and Singleton to do next spring in the pre-draft process. Might as well go through dress rehearsals now. It all amounts to a value-add beyond instruction on blitz-pickup technique or running a crisper route from the slot.
"There's a timing to every play," Drayton says. "And if you are processing it, you're going to play slow and take hits. But if you are studying it to slow the game down, then the game will slow down. And you'll play fast and you'll play past hits."
In all, it's a convincing argument to be happy.
Envy is a blight, and Penn State's otherwise taciturn tailbacks demonstrate something like a flinch of anger at the suggestion that it ever crept into their shared space. "Why be jealous over your brother when he's always got your back?" Allen says.
But a human nevertheless needs reasons to be satisfied. And a very good running back in 2025 needs to understand why splitting time with another very good running back makes sense. A redefinition of success -- shooting for the intercept of production and longevity -- has to take.
Here, right where Kaytron Allen and Nick Singleton are, it evidently has. They will get touches. They probably will make a lot of those touches. To wit: Both recorded eight carries in a season-opening rout of Nevada, accounting for three touchdowns combined, with Singleton adding a 22-yard reception to the mix. Penn State may win a lot more games, maybe even a national title, as a result of the arrangement. Its star tailbacks will then presumably have a chance to make a lot more money, and possibly for a lot longer than they might if they had to do this alone.