Whether or not the dude ends up working out, one of my favorite things each offseason is stumbling across an exciting player I’d previously never heard of -- sometimes that guy turns out to be Pete Guerriero, sometimes that guy turns out to be Julius Chestnut, sometimes that guy turns out to be Patrick Laird, and sometimes that guy turns out to be James Robinson. Until recently, I was frustrated at not having come across such a prospect during this year’s pre-Draft cycle, but Cody Carpentier brought someone to my attention in an unfortunately unrecorded portion of the conversation I had with him on the BDGE airwaves earlier this week: Harvard running back Aidan Borguet.

To be clear right up front, I don’t believe that Borguet has the sort of upside that I saw in both Chestnut and Robinson. I do think, however, that he could be somewhere on the Abram Smith-Jaylen Warren-Myles Gaskin spectrum (shoutout to Cody for that middle comp) as a fire hydrant with legs and a Napoleon complex.

Part of the reason I don’t believe Borguet has an RB1 ceiling in the NFL is that he played at the FCS level and didn’t truly break out until his fourth year at school. I don’t care much about breakout age for running backs, but the talent gap between the average starting running back in the Ivy League and a guy has the potential to start on even a short-term basis in the NFL is quite large, so I’m less willing to hear arguments about development and veteran deference and COVID years at such a low level of competition. That said, Borguet’s career was interrupted by a complete cancellation of the 2020 campaign that would have been his sophomore season. That was a bummer for Borguet specifically given that he was coming off a freshman year in which he operated as the clear second back while averaging 3.1 yards per carry greater than the team’s junior starter, an impressive first season punctuated by a finale against Yale (who was a top-25 ranked FCS team at the time) in which Borguet ran for 269 yards (a single-game record for the 148-year old rivalry) and 4 touchdowns on just 11 carries.

Jaylen Warren contributed well as a rookie with the Steelers last year after starting his college career as the workhorse at Snow Community College.

That performance is available to watch on YouTube, and while there’s obvious rawness to Borguet’s game in that video, he was a freshman at the time and the things that make him an interesting prospect were equally as prevalent as were the peccadillos: he’s stoutly built (he was 205 pounds at just over 5’8 at his Pro Day, making him built like one of these Devin Singletary- or Devonta Freeman-type guys), he breaks a ton of tackles (PFF has his career rate of missed tackles forced per attempt at 0.33, a 97th-percentile mark that makes Borguet kind of the Ivy League David Montgomery), and he’s explosive (the unofficial 10-yard split he posted during his Pro Day forty-yard dash was a 1.52 that lands in the 84th-percentile and matches the times of both Bijan Robinson and Jahmyr Gibbs). All of those things point to Borguet’s being a little ball of muscle, and his performance on the bench at his Pro Day -- where he put up 35 reps at 225 pounds, the most of any running back in my post-2007 database and a number that would’ve been the second-highest among all players across all positions at this year’s Combine -- is definitive evidence that this dude is a workout warrior.

Minus that bench press performance (modest is hottest), here’s how Borguet’s overall physical profile stacks up relative to NFL-quality backs in the last decade-and-a-half:

The Speed Score zealots are sure to turn up their nose at Borguet’s 20th-percentile mark, but his long speed is well within the realm of normal for NFL backs (though obviously on the low end), his virtually average pound-per-inch ratio indicates that he’s more short than small, and the aforementioned 10-yard split combines with his strong vertical leap to form evidence of meal-ticket athletic traits that he can win with on the field. Indeed, there are legitimate NFL success stories among the historical prospects whose physical profiles comp most closely to Borguet’s:

Brian Westbrook averaged over 19 PPR points per game in five straight seasons in the mid-2000s (I had a dominant redraft team in 2007 that had 50-touchdown Tom Brady, 23-touchdown Randy Moss, 1400-scrimmage yard and 15-touchdown Joseph Addai, and 2100-yard and 12-touchdown Westbrook that lost in the semi-finals when Westbrook took a knee at the one-yard line on what would have been a 25-yard touchdown in order to run out the clock against the Cowboys), and while the next best NFL contributors on this list are Myles Gaskin, Devin Singletary, and Jaylen Warren -- two placeholder backs and one peppy JAG -- that’s kinda the outcome we’re shooting for here. It’s true that Gaskin was an afterthought in the Draft who fell backwards into volume, but you still have to be good enough to even put yourself in the position to benefit from serendipity, and it’s true that Warren is a UDFA whose crowning achievement is convincing the Steelers to give Najee Harris a breather every once in a while, but you gotta have some talent, some dawg, or some combination of the two in you in order to accomplish that where higher regarded players (Benny Snell, Anthony McFarland, and Kalen Ballage were all fourth-round picks) failed to. They represent precedent for an athlete like Borguet punching above his draft stock in the NFL.

After Borguet’s solid freshman season and canceled sophomore year, he had an underwhelming junior season in which he played behind another junior, but this time that junior was Aaron Shampklin, who signed a reserve/futures contract with the Colts in January. Last season, though, Borguet was a stud: he ran for the ninth-most yards in the FCS on a per-game basis and posted a 32.7% Dominator Rating (higher than the senior-year marks for other non-FBS backs like Chestnut, Chase Edmonds, and Pierre Strong) while averaging 2.29 yards per carry greater and ripping off explosive runs 13% more often than the collective other backs at Harvard did, numbers that land in the 95th and 99th percentiles, respectively. Level of competition caveats obviously apply, but Borguet’s career marks in those metrics outpace those of other small school runners like Danny Woodhead, David Johnson, Strong, James Robinson, and Austin Ekeler in the case of YPC+, and Chestnut and Strong in the case of Chunk Rate+ (who are the only other non-FBS guys I have CR+ numbers for).

Basically, Borguet is an NFL-quality athlete who breaks a ton of tackles and was super efficient at the FCS level after sitting behind another NFL-quality back -- you can weave a reasonable tale about how that player turns into a legitimate contributor as a glue guy in a professional backfield. Where Borguet will probably not make a huge impact is in the passing game -- he caught 11 balls in his entire college career, didn’t take a single snap either in the slot or out wide, and caught just under 75% of his total targets, a mark in the 37th percentile. That receiving production would be low among the guys on Borguet’s comps list, but it’s not as if players like Gaskin, Singletary, and Warren are on the field by virtue of their pass-catching chops. It’s not necessary for Borguet to be a legitimate satellite back who’s getting schemed up in the passing game, but it’s probably imperative that he be able to pass-protect effectively and catch the football when it’s thrown his direction. As a first-team Academic All-American (an honor that considers players from both FBS and FCS schools) with a 3.78 GPA at Harvard, it would stand to reason that Borguet has the intelligence, work ethic, and teachability necessary to improve those key areas of his game. If he can do those things, he’ll have a good chance to play himself into position to benefit from serendipity.