The Greatest Rusher in Kansas History Got Drafted 184th
Every rushing record the Kansas Jayhawks keep – career yards, career touchdowns, consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, 100-yard games – belongs to a player the New Orleans Saints took in the sixth round. Pick 184. That’s where the NFL put Devin Neal after four years of production that would have made him a second-rounder coming out of Ohio State or Alabama. He finished with 4,343 rushing yards and 49 touchdowns at Kansas. The previous record holder, June Henley, had been standing since the 1990s.
Neal grew up in Lawrence, Kansas – same city, same school system, same streets as the program he eventually rewrote. He was the consensus top recruit in the state coming out of Lawrence High, a four-star back with offers from Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas State, and Oklahoma State. He picked the Jayhawks anyway, when KU was still one of the worst teams in the Big 12. Lance Leipold hadn’t even finished his first season yet.
His freshman year: 707 yards, eight touchdowns, 158 carries across all 12 games. He became the first freshman in school history to win Big 12 Offensive Player of the Week. Sophomore year Kansas reached its first bowl game since 2008, and Neal averaged 6.1 yards per carry while breaking 1,000 yards. Junior year he got second-team All-Big 12 recognition and helped KU finish the season ranked for the first time since 2007. By then he had a decision to make.
He stayed. Most players in his position declare – one more year of carries means one more year of injury risk, and the draft board doesn’t get more favorable just because you wait. Neal came back for 2024 anyway, partly to finish what he started. He finished it. In a November game against No. 17 Iowa State at Arrowhead Stadium, he took a 14-yard run on his very first carry and passed Henley’s all-time yardage mark. Two touchdowns later, he’d broken Henley’s rushing TD record too. Leipold wore a shirt that read “REAL DE4L” on the sideline.
Two weeks after that came Colorado. The Buffaloes were ranked 16th. Deion Sanders had built something in Boulder that the national media couldn’t stop talking about. Neal touched the ball 41 times, ran for 287 total yards from scrimmage, scored four touchdowns, and Kansas won 37-21. He handled Colorado’s entire offense by himself, essentially. His final home game ended with him holding every significant rushing record in program history.
Senior season final line: 1,266 yards, 16 touchdowns, 219 carries. He graduated with a degree in Sports Management and a minor in Business.
The scouting reports all said roughly the same thing: patient, decisive, good contact balance, soft hands out of the backfield, lacks top-end burst. His 40 time at the combine was 4.58. That number, more than any other, explains where he landed. NFL evaluators clock the 40 and make decisions that 4,343 college yards apparently can’t override. He also ran a 37.5-inch vertical and broad-jumped 10-foot-4, which are not the numbers of a slow player – but the 40 is the 40, and 4.58 is a backup’s number in most teams’ models.
New Orleans took him 184th overall on April 26, 2025. He signed a four-year deal worth $4.45 million. First Jayhawk off the board in the draft.
His rookie season looked, for most of the year, like what you’d expect from a sixth-round pick behind Alvin Kamara: spot carries, special teams, learning the system. Then Kamara’s knee and ankle started giving out in November, and suddenly Neal was the starting running back for an NFL team. He made the most of it. Weeks 13, 14, and 15 he averaged 15 opportunities per game. He scored twice. In Week 14 against Tampa Bay he ripped off a 21-yard gain on the outside and later scored his first career NFL touchdown on a 3-yard run. In Week 15 against Carolina he scored again.
Then a hamstring went in the Carolina game, and that was his season. Ten appearances, three starts, 57 carries for 206 yards, 17 catches for 104 yards, two touchdowns, zero fumbles.
In March 2026, New Orleans signed Travis Etienne Jr. to a four-year deal. Etienne had gone over 1,000 rushing yards in three of the last four seasons. He is 27. Neal, who turns 23 in August, was immediately reclassified as a backup. By late April, Pro Football Reference listed him as having signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
So: the greatest rusher in Kansas history, three starts, two touchdowns, cut loose before his second NFL season. Whether that’s a story about the cruelty of roster math or about a player whose college production was always a product of volume at a mid-major program – that’s a genuine question, and the 206 rookie yards don’t settle it either way. He ran well when he ran. He also ran on a 5-13 team that wasn’t going anywhere, behind a line protecting a rookie quarterback, against defenses that had nothing to lose. Both of those things happened in the same three-game stretch.
Jacksonville will tell us more. It usually takes a change of address to find out what a player is.
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