With all due respect to my esteemed colleague Alex Scarborough, Derrick Henry will eventually end up being the guy at running back for Alabama.

And by “eventually,” I mean this fall.

T.J. Yeldon has had a tremendous two-year career with Alabama. He has the stats to back it up, as Alex so thoroughly laid out in his column earlier today, and he was a high-prized recruit coming out of high school. I think he's an excellent player. I even picked him to lead the Crimson Tide in total offense in 2012.

But there's something special about Henry, who broke Ken Hall's 51-year-old national high school rushing record with 12,124 yards, after rushing for 4,261 yards as a senior at Yulee High in Florida in 2012. He somehow finds time to fit size, power, speed and elusiveness in his 6-foot-3, 238-pound frame.

Alex is right when he talks about Yeldon's body of work compared to Henry's. As a freshman last season, Henry only ran for 382 yards (10.6 yards per carry, though) and three touchdowns. He wasn't much of a factor in the running game for most of the season. But remember, he was the team's third-leading rusher during last spring's scrimmages before fracturing his leg in mid-April. He didn't make it back until fall camp, so just imagine if he had more time to work with guys over the summer and more time to adjust his body to the college game.

I'm not saying he would have started last season, but we would have seen more production from him.

And we will this fall. Henry is just too good to keep off of the field, and we saw that during the Tide's loss to Oklahoma in the Allstate Sugar Bowl. He might not have pushed Alabama to a victory inside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, but he was easily the best offensive player on the field for Alabama that night. He showed off his sick moves and had 161 total yards of offense and two touchdowns on just nine touches.

He showed off his agility and speed on a smooth, 43-yard touchdown run in third quarter in which he powered his way through both his own and Oklahoma's line and sprinted to the end zone with relative ease. A quarter later, he was at it again with a nifty, 61-yard catch-and-run for another touchdown that put Alabama right back in the game late.

Feel free to watch those videos again because they were pure poetry in motion.

We've barely even scratched the surface with Henry, who is built to grind. I don't want to say he has Godzilla-like strength, but it might not be a stretch. He won't have an issue driving through the trenches before showing off his leg strength and shiftiness to grab even more yards. He's an every-down back who will push his way to more and more carries this fall.

And while I really like what Yeldon can do, he has an almost chronic fumbling issue that actually led to more of Henry in the Sugar Bowl. Do you think Nick Saban is going to allow his bell cow running back be a liability with the football again? Not with a guy like Henry breathing down Yeldon's neck.

This competition is only going to heat up during fall camp, and it's going to make both of them even better. Yeldon is the running back of the present, but Henry is the future, and the future could come sooner than later in Tuscaloosa.