Eastern Washington looks to stable of running backs to improve rushing production

For all its notable achievements in the passing game over the past 12 years, including the production of a trio of Walter Payton Award winners and some of the most prolific quarterbacks in the FCS, Eastern Washington football isn’t averse to running the ball from time to time, too.

It just might have looked that way last year.

The Eagles ranked eighth or ninth in the Big Sky in the major rushing categories of attempts, yards, yards per attempt and touchdowns, a middling-at-best finish that was as much a result of trailing by a lot early in many games as it was about any concerted effort to run – or not run – the football.

But this year, with a stable of running backs and no clear candidate to lead the Big Sky in rushing, the Eagles are looking to find their feet in the ground game in an effort to rebound from a 3-8 season.

“You’ve got to run the ball,” EWU head coach Aaron Best said before the season, in July, “and unless your quarterback is really, really dynamic and you’re willing to get him hit 15 times a game, you’ve got to have a tight end or two and get in sets and do some of the same things you do out of (no tight end) sets.”

The Eagles are confident they have plenty of running backs who can get their ground game back to the production levels of 2019, when the Eagles averaged the second-most yards per carry (5.3) and third-most yards per game (207.8) in the Big Sky. An even greater achievement would be to match the league-leading 255.9 yards per game they ran for in 2018, when they won 12 games.

“(Offensive coordinator Jim) Chapin tells us every day we can be the best offense in America if we put the work in and keep doing what our coaches tell us to do,” sophomore running back Tuna Altahir said last week.

Altahir led the Eagles in rushing with 420 yards on 104 carries last year, when he started eight games. They also got 403 yards from Justice Jackson and 245 from Micah Smith. Both are back this season.

But the Eagles also have on the roster senior Isaiah Lewis, redshirt freshmen Nick Adimora and Talon Betts, redshirt junior Brandon Montoya and junior transfer Malik Dotson.

Whether the team will develop a bell-cow, every-down back or will hand out carries by committee is still being determined, said Brandon Johnson-Farrell, Eastern’s first-year running backs coach.

“By the looks of things we have a handful of guys who can come in and help us,” Johnson-Farrell said. “It’ll be hard for teams to gameplan because we have so much versatility in the backfield.”

Dotson is an intriguing member of the group, having transferred this offseason from Feather River College in California. It is the same program from which the Eagles plucked junior quarterback Jared Taylor, who “stood on the table” in support of his former JUCO and high school teammate, Johnson-Farrell said.

“It was almost like a no-brainer (to recruit Dotson), because Jared has been a perfect asset to the team,” Johnson-Farrell said. “He was a missing puzzle piece in the room.”

That’s because the 6-foot, 200-pound Dotson is extremely versatile, Johnson-Farrell said, offering a balance of speed, physicality and adeptness in open space.

Those are skills Dotson put to good use last year at Feather River, when in 10 games he ran for 1,057 yards and 21 touchdowns on 114 carries. He also caught 11 passes for 233 yards and three scores.

All that he put up with Taylor as the team’s quarterback, who himself ran for 847 yards and eight touchdowns as the Golden Eagles employed a three-headed approach to their run game. Tanner Hall, the third (1,057 yards and 15 scores on 123 carries), transferred to Idaho State.

“We were a run-heavy offense,” Dotson said. “We always called Jared a running back. … We had three dudes in the backfield going whatever which way, and it was hard for defenses to key on any one person.”

After playing his senior year at Lakewood High School in Arlington during the pandemic-truncated year – Taylor was a year ahead and had a full final season – Dotson said he didn’t get any Division I walk-on offers, so being at Eastern is the achievement of a goal.

“It’s such a blessing,” said Dotson, who played at College of the Desert in California before Feather River. “This is what I’ve been working for. Coming out of high school and going to junior college, it’s hard. It’s hard to get to the Division I level.”

The Eagles will surely throw the ball plenty this year with redshirt sophomore Kekoa Visperas as the projected starting quarterback and Taylor vying with junior Michael Wortham for backup duties. A program that has produced Walter Payton winners Eric Barriere (2021), Cooper Kupp (2015) and Bo Levi Mitchell (2011) isn’t going to abandon its passing identity, either.

But in the past, when the Eagles have been at their best, they’ve been able to pass and run effectively.

Whether that means the team has on its roster the team’s first 1,000-yard rusher since 2019, when Antoine Custer Jr. finished with 1,228, is yet to be determined.

“Everybody wants to be the guy at the end of the day,” Dotson said, “but it’s really different (at Eastern), because I’ve been at places where they run two or three running backs, and you can feel like they don’t want you to succeed. In this group, everybody’s succeeding. Everybody wants everybody to do well, to fight through adversity and get the job done.”