Who Are the Best Rookie RBs in '24? Charts and Stats, Physicals
Charting the rookie RBs coming into the NFL Draft and exposing the potential next Deebo Samuel RB-WR hybrid.
The NFL Scouting Combine is next week. The Draft begins on April 25. Dynasty fantasy football leagues will hold their drafts before too long. Let’s get acquainted with the incoming rookies, starting with running backs.
Per the analysts, Texas’s Jonathan Brooks, Oregon’s Bucky Irving, and Michigan’s Blake Corum are the three best RBs in the draft. Brooks is being drafted first in most of the fantasy football rookie mock drafts I have been seeing.
Physical Attributes
Wisconsin’s Braelon Allen is the biggest running back, but he is still faster than most of the other prospects.
Bucky Irving, who put up some of the best production of the 2023 season, and Blake Corum, who had one of the best careers, fall down the physical attributes chart because they are undersized. But Corum is well-built for someone as tall as me: 5 foot, 8 inches. And Irving’s weight is in the range of successful pass-catching 2023 rookies like De’Von Achane, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Kyren Williams. (Their 40 times are mostly taken from high school records.)
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Statistical Production
Bucky Irving tops the combined production profile of all RB prospects entering the 2024 NFL Draft. Amongst highly-scouted prospects, Notre Dame’s Audric Estime, Tennessee’s Jaylen Wright, Jonathon Brooks, and Braelon Allen also stand out as having had excellent seasons.
I added a couple of more names to my chart of statistical production, but some who put up great numbers are not highly regarded by the scouts. (I didn’t include breakaway yards (yards gained on carries of 10+) or % of yards that are breakaway plays because those stats could mean either good or bad things—the RB is either a playmaker or is inconsistent.)
Tyrone Tracy: A Hybrid RB-WR?
Purdue’s Tyrone Tracy is one of the most interesting prospects—and he’s off the radar of many analysts. He transferred from Iowa to Purdue as a fifth-year senior then played two more years at Purdue for a total of six years. But he had the second-highest rate of forced missed tackles, the fifth-highest per-carry average, and the second-highest overall production profile in my model. He’s gone completely unnoticed in the RB rankings of CBS, but PFF ranks him as their No. 11 RB.
RB Tiers
Now I plot the top prospects by production and athleticism. (The chart only includes the consensus top 12. Some of the prospects—including Tracy—do not have 40 times readily available.)
The results of my chart largely track with the big board rankings of PFF. PFF really likes Jaylen Wright. He’s their RB2, but he’s only the RB12 in CBS’s rankings and the RB8 in the average analyst’s rankings tracked by the NFL Mock Draft Database. On the other hand, PFF is a lot lower on Braelon Allen—they consider him to be plodding—than many other analysts. PFF has Allen as their RB10, but he’s the RB2 in CBS’s rankings and the RB4 in the Mock Draft DB.
Another player who is going to be highly scrutinized is Blake Corum. Corum would have been about one tier higher tier if I had plugged in his 2022 numbers. He had a terrible drop off from a 5.9 average per carry his junior year to 4.8 yards per carry as a senior. He averaged 6.6 yards per carry as a sophomore. Two straight years of diminishing returns.
Put all of this together with your own opinions. Watch some film. Then wait until they get drafted and see project what kind of role they might have on their new teams.