2026 TCU Football Season Preview: Running Backs
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Jeremy Payne made perhaps the biggest highlight play of the 2025 season, catching a check-down pass from backup quarterback Ken Seals and dancing around USC defenders before sprinting for the game-winning touchdown to lift the Horned Frogs to a season-ending victory over the Trojans at the Alamo Bowl.
Payne will return as TCU’s lead ball carrier this coming season. The junior running back made four starts and played in 11 games during the 2025 campaign, missing two to injury. He rushed for a career-high 623 yards and five touchdowns on a 5.7 yards-per-carry average and finished the season with six runs of 15-plus yards. Payne, a former four-star recruit out of Hightower High School in Missouri City, Texas, showed flashes as a freshman in 2024, when he carried the ball for 239 yards and three touchdowns for an otherwise lackluster rushing attack.
Payne has made plays out of the backfield as well, catching 34 passes for 306 yards and two touchdowns, both in 2025, over his two years with the Horned Frogs. The 5-foot-10, 180-pounder is the clear favorite to lead TCU’s backfield in 2026, but who will join him? TCU lost two running backs, Nate Palmer and Derrick Carroll, to the transfer portal. The Horned Frogs also graduated seniors Kevorian Barnes and Trent Battle, who each took on significant roles this past season. Barnes, a UTSA transfer, started in TCU’s opener against North Carolina and finished the year with 443 rushing yards and three touchdowns despite being limited by a lower-body injury.
Battle, a quarterback-turned-running back, played in 48 games as a Frog and provided quality depth for the backfield. He enjoyed the best season of his career in 2025, rushing for 349 yards and six touchdowns on a career-best 5.5 yards-per-carry average. The departures of Battle and Barnes, as well as Palmer and Carroll, leave TCU with only four running backs on the 2026 roster. One of those is true sophomore Jon Denman, a three-star prospect out of Westwood High School in Palestine, Texas. Primarily a short-yardage specialist who made an impact off the bench, Denman ran for 178 yards and three touchdowns while playing in all 13 games.
Another option will be Landon Walker, an incoming transfer from Division II Colorado School of Mines. Rated a three-star transfer, Walker arrives as a graduate student who rushed for 474 yards and three touchdowns in four games last season before suffering a season-ending injury. A two-time All-RMAC selection and the 2022 RMAC Offensive Freshman of the Year, Walker rumbled for 741 yards and 11 scores in 2024, 790 yards and 12 scores in 2023 and 220 yards and three scores in 2023. At 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds, Walker provides the most size of any ball carrier in the TCU backfield. Walker, from Fort Worth, played high school ball at Keller Central.
Redshirt sophomore Joe Pitchford, a special teamer, rounds out the running back room for the Horned Frogs, who have a new running backs coach in Antonio Wilcox. Wilcox, hired from UConn, replaces Jimmy Smith, who departed for Georgia Tech. At UConn, Wilcox helped develop Cam Edwards into a 1,000-yard rusher and the first for the program in six years. The Horned Frogs should also see their run game improve under new offensive coordinator Gordon Sammis, who comes from UConn as well. In 2024, the Huskies accumulated 5,169 yards of offense, third-most in program history, while also running for 2,590 yards, second-most in program history. Edwards rumbled for 1,132 yards in 2025, which were 17th-most in the country.
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