This is going to sound facetious but it's not, I love rusty's steadfastness with not giving up on Will Howard. You're 100% right though. Howard has unquestionably better stats across the board as a partial freshman year than Ell did through his entire sophomore year. The only stat Ell had more of was touchdown runs but Ell had a lot more attempts. Will has more touchdowns, yards per attempt, adjusted yards per attempt, less interceptions, even the yards per carry between the two is the same 4.7. This was 16 games for Ell compared to only 9 for Will. So he still has plenty of time.
I will say the only difference is that with Ell, even if he wasn't producing and turning the ball over badly, we could see it was in him, we saw he was going to be good. Will didn't show that yet, he's plucky but we aren't seeing anything close to what we saw with Ell.
This whole game used to be on YouTube but now it's gone, anyway it's my favorite loss of all time, any sport. You'll get the idea from the highlights.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/pG_oOPFiQZg[/youtube]