I want to talk about production-based breakout players from inside the collegiate ranks today, of which -- as the title of this article indicates -- there were 101 in 2023. That number probably feels high, and in the traditional sense of mining for future NFL fantasy studs -- RB1 and RB2 types -- by using some pre-established Dominator Rating (or whatever) threshold, it certainly would be high! My goals and methodology are a bit different from that, so it’s probably helpful for me to explain my process (and thought process!) before we get into the weeds of the individual players involved.

First, I think it’s useful to define a “breakout” not just in terms of how the relevant players might be expected to produce as professionals but in terms of how impressive they were in the context of the entire population of amateur runners. In other words, we don’t have to frame breakouts around uncertain predictions about future success when we can frame them around players’ status relative to each other both with the benefit of hindsight (using data from historical players) and in real time (using data from the current player pool), and we retain the benefits of the former process given that its goals are downstream of my chosen framing mechanism anyway (inasmuch as the top X-, Y-, or Z-percent of college running backs go on to accomplish A, B, or C in the NFL, and insomuch as referring to RB1s or RB2s in NFL fantasy football necessarily frames their production around the numbers posted by every other running back in the league).

The framing mechanism I’m referring to can be thought of as a strainer, or perhaps as a series of strainers. In 2023, there were 469 running backs from the 133 teams at the FBS level who a) played in at least five games, and b) touched the ball at least one time, together representing the total population of runners whose on-field contributions were substantial enough (though the bar here is not high) to qualify them (by my estimation) for inclusion in the current collegiate player pool. Basically, those guys are the ones who are relevant. From that group we want to figure out who is most likely -- on the basis of production -- to provide fantasy utility in the NFL.

As mentioned above, we could accomplish that by subjecting each player to the hot-or-not adjudication of a rigid metric threshold, counting “in” all the players who land at or above whatever line we pick and counting “out” all the players who fall below that line. Because we know production isn’t the be-all and end-all of player evaluation, however, such rigidity strikes me as too constraining, so I instead prefer to make my judgments on more of a sliding scale: rather than a simple “hot-or-not”, we rate our running backs on a continuum of hotness.

This begs the question of how to measure hotness, or rather how to measure NFL potential vis-à-vis quality of collegiate production. Dominator Rating (as well as other market share-based metrics like yards per team play, etc.) does an admirable job of adjusting the volume-stat output of individual players based on the context of their respective teams’ overall offensive productivity, but its resulting removal of “team strength” from the calculus of judging player production goes too far in leveling the cross-situational playing field. In other words: while it’s more useful to know that Darrell Henderson posted a 33.4% Dominator Rating as a fourth-year man at Memphis than it is to know that he totaled 2204 scrimmage yards and scored 25 touchdowns in that same season, it’s also useful to know how big of a pie his slice of offensive productivity came from! Dominator Rating is useful because yards and touchdowns are not equally up for grabs in every offensive environment, but Dominator Rating is inadequate because grabbing 33.4% of the available yards and touchdowns is not equally impressive in every offensive environment.

My solution to this problem is to contextualize market share-based production numbers (using Dominator Rating, which I calculate on a prorated per-game basis and by giving double weight to yards relative to touchdowns) with the quality of team -- using Bill Connolly’s S&P+ rating system for overall team strength and offensive unit strength -- that those numbers were posted on. The higher the Dominator Rating, the more a player dominated (obviously) his team’s available production, and the better the team, the more impressive that degree of domination. We come to a final, usable metric by averaging together the percentile ranks of a given player’s seasonal Dominator Rating and of his team’s S&P+ ratings (with double weight in this case given to Dominator Rating, otherwise we just end up helmet-scouting), producing what I very creatively call a “production score”. Because this score is directly informed by percentile ranks, it is expressed on a 0-100 scale and necessarily reflects how impressive a given player’s production was in relation to that of every other running back in the player pool. More specifically, such a score reflects how impressive a given player’s production was in relation to that of every other Year-X running back in the player pool: the score of 89.2 produced by the interaction between TreVeyon Henderson’s 27.3% Dominator Rating and the S&P+ ratings of the Ohio State squad it was posted on this year (more or less) reflects that Henderson’s 2023 production ranks in the 89th percentile among all current and historical third-year running backs rather than among all current and historical running backs, period (meaning regardless of age and classification).

Let’s return to our analogy by imagining a series of five or so strainers stacked vertically -- with their filtration holes widest at the top and increasingly small as we approach the bottom -- and with a giant tub suspended above them. In the tub is all manner of earthen roughage: big rocks, little rocks, loose clumps, tiny grains of sand, etc. At the bottom of this whole procession of strainers is a small tub with nothing in it. If we were to dump out the big tub at the top into the first strainer, we’d see the biggest rocks clank down and stay there with the other terrestrial bits embarking on a trickle-down through the stack of strainers, each one ending its journey at whichever filtration point it could not penetrate, and only the finest of grains ending up in the small tub at the bottom. While imposing a single strict cut-off for Dominator Rating (or whatever production metric you want to use) is akin to making use of only the last and pickiest strainer in our stack, thereby leaving anything other than individual grains of sand (the “hot” running backs) to pile up in one indistinguishable mound (made up of all the “not hot” running backs), utilizing the entire stack of strainers allows us to more effectively discern between the degrees of hotness of all running backs and to therefore find diamonds in the relative roughage that never passes (or even reaches!) the final strainer.

Applied to the issue at hand, our strainers will be a series of production score thresholds by which we can say a given player “broke out” in 2023 according to a sliding scale of standards. The first of these standards will be the 60th-percentile threshold, the approximate line of demarcation between guys-who-probably-aren’t-good-enough-to-play-in-the-NFL and guys-who-might-be-good-enough-to-play-in-the-NFL. Such a threshold is not strictly arbitrary. The top 40% of the 469 relevant running backs in the collegiate player pool is made up of about 188 players, good for an average -- if we assume that such a pool is divided somewhat equally among freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior players (this is clearly not an exact science but I think you’ll find that quick and dirty math is adequate here) -- of about 47 players per yearly classification. That number lines up very closely with the amount of running backs who leave the college ranks and receive some kind of NFL opportunity each season: in the last six years, an average of 20.7 running backs per year have been selected in the NFL Draft while another 33.8 have signed UDFA contracts with NFL teams. Give or take 10 or 20 players in a particular year, those running backs performing at a 60th-percentile-or-better level in college are the ones we should be focusing on as potential NFL players, making the 60.0 mark in production score a natural initial filtration point.

Let’s talk about some actual players. Here are the guys whose 2023 production scores a) landed somewhere in the 60-range, and b) eclipsed the 60.0 mark for the first time in their careers, grouped by the amount of years removed from high school they were this season (a disclaimer about yearly classifications is probably appropriate: I think I’ve done a decent job of wading through the mess of eligibility that COVID years and the frequently-changing transfer rules have brought upon the college landscape in recent seasons, but the possibility remains that I have incorrectly classified players as part of completing this exercise):

The whole concept of breakout age tells us that the youngest players in this group are the ones most worth paying attention to, and I don’t disagree: Roderick Robinson, Justice Haynes, and Jeremiah Love all contributed well (to varying degrees) behind veteran starters at blue-blood programs, with (for example) Robinson’s 8.0% Dominator Rating on a nationally-contending Georgia squad (their overall S&P+ rating this year landed in the 97th-percentile among all college teams since at least 2000) very similar to the sort of seasons that Najee Harris and Ezekiel Elliott put together as freshmen (both in his top-six comps and with at least a 93.9% data-based match).

The other guys who jump out to me as particularly interesting here (though they certainly aren’t the only interesting players on the list) are Kaden Feagin, LJ Johnson and Camar Wheaton, Kadarius Calloway, Ta’Ron Keith, Ayo Adeyi, and Lorenzo Lingard.

Let’s move one strainer down, where it is necessary to expand upon my thought process once again. At strainer #2, we will be looking at the running backs who eclipsed the 70.0 mark for the first time in 2023, though that doesn’t necessarily mean those players did not already eclipse the 60.0 mark in a previous season (though they also might not have). By “breakout”, then, I really mean something more like “tier-jump” in terms of the professional expectations we can hold for the players involved; the aforementioned Robinson might post a production score of 80+ next season, at which point I would consider him to have followed up his freshman breakout with a sophomore breakout relative to a higher standard and indicative of a greater degree of NFL potential. Here are the 70+ scorers:

Tier-jumping indeed! Now instead of fringe contributors we’re looking at some legitimate producers at minor Power Five programs, role players on elite teams, small-school RB1s, redshirt studs, and everything in between. Darius Taylor earned his 76.4 by dominating production on a weak Minnesota team to a degree not seen from a freshman in the Power Five conferences since the turn of the century (the uniqueness of his year is represented in one regard by the fact that there are zero running backs in my production database whose freshman seasons match Taylor’s by greater than even 87.7%), while Jahiem White, Abu Sama, and Mark Fletcher all came to their breakout numbers via late ascensions up the depth chart on middling Power Five schools.

Years two through four are also particularly fruitful here. Phil Mafah broke into the 60-range as a first-year guy at Clemson, but after a junior season not dissimilar from those posted by historical draftees as varied as Rashaad Penny, Nick Chubb, Darrynton Evans, Zamir White, and Nyheim Hines, and with the runway to touches seemingly clear with Will Shipley heading to the NFL, he is set up well to finish out his college career with a Sony Michel- or Hassan Haskins-level senior season that could help him secure day-two draft capital (not that I’m predicting such NFL investment, but guys with similar careers through three seasons have done it in the past!). Kendall Milton and Peny Boone put together excellent final-year auditions, and the crop of sophomore backs here is fantastic: literally all of them are worth keeping an eye on as potential fantasy-relevant pro backs (though Jordan James, Makhi Hughes, and Jaydon Blue are my favorite among them).

Moving down to strainer #3, we have guys who eclipsed the 80.0 threshold for the first time in their college careers:

We’re clearly getting more selective here, and this group is the first from which I would expect (rather than hope) to be able to mine some RB2-or-better fantasy production at the next level. Everyone knows about CJ Baxter, Omarion Hampton, Ashton Jeanty, and Ollie Gordon, but the other players here (especially the other year-two and year-three producers) are well worth keeping an eye on. The season DJ Giddens put together is closely comparable to the junior campaigns posted by historical runners like Melvin Gordon, Tyler Allgeier, Nyheim Hines, and Zach Charbonnet, and his career numbers through three seasons are similar to those posted by past prospects like Lamar Miller, Joe Mixon, Kyren Williams, and Jeremy Hill. Everyone is (justifiably) excited about Trevor Etienne heading to Georgia, but Le’Veon Moss, Gavin Sawchuk, and Jonah Coleman all had more impressive sophomore seasons in 2023 than Travis’ little brother did. Coleman in particular is one to watch: at 225 pounds, he totaled more than 1100 yards from scrimmage on a top-15 Arizona team while catching 25 passes, posting a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 159.8%, and averaging over five yards after contact per rushing attempt.

Let’s move onto our final strainer, under which we will find our little tub filled only with fine grains of sand that managed production scores over the 90.0 mark for the first time in 2023:

Blake Corum’s 26.8% Dominator Rating posted on Michigan’s National Championship team earns him 2023’s other 90+ production score, but the above players are the only three to vault themselves into that territory for the first time this year (Corum’s 2022 numbers produced a score of 93.5). Let’s look at the comps lists for each of their collegiate careers.

Out of the 161 sixth-year seasons in my post-2008 production database, Cody Schrader’s 2023 numbers rank as the second-most impressive. As the other names at the top of that list indicate, however, NFL success is not guaranteed by a strong age-23 or -24 season at the college level: Schrader’s numbers land just behind those of Joe Williams and immediately ahead of those posted by Mohamed Ibrahim, DJ Harper, and Devontae Booker. I don’t have a way to account for non-FBS seasons inside my current methodology, but using Schrader’s two years at Missouri, his most similar historical producers are (in order) Jawhar Jordan, Williams, Calvin Tyler Jr., Booker, and Issac Guerendo.

Audric Estime’s nearly 1500 scrimmage yards and 18 touchdowns produced a 31.6% Dominator Rating on a quality Notre Dame team, generating the 37th-best production score among third-year college runners in the last fifteen years. As with Giddens, his career numbers are closely comparable to those of Jeremy Hill, Kyren Williams, Lamar Miller, and Giovani Bernard. I’m excited to dive into his film this offseason, but even if he turns out to be not much more than a two-down plodder, the Hill career arc represents decent precedent for players like Estime producing at the next level.

Our 101st breakout of the 2023 season belongs to Jonathon Brooks, who -- according to production score (though further substantiated by his rushing efficiency numbers and volume receiving statistics) -- was the best running back in college football this season. That 93.3 is the 20th-best score for a junior in the post-2008 era and boasts Carlos Hyde, Derrius Guice, Corum, and Saquon Barkley among third-year backs with seasons of at least 95% similarity. The five most similar career profiles to the one Brooks leaves Texas with this offseason belong to Giddens and then four proven NFL producers: Lamar Miller, Joe Mixon, Jeremy Hill, and Kyren Williams. The ACL tear complicates things a bit, but Brooks is a fantastic in-a-vacuum prospect who would be a decent contender for RB1 in most draft classes.