The bad news is true: at least from a prospecting perspective, there are no Bijan Robinsons, Breece Halls, or Saquon Barkleys in the 2024 running back class, nobody who weighs 215 pounds and runs sub-4.5 and catches the ball well and runs efficiently and has a pristine history of collegiate production and is declaring as a junior. The threshold checklists that the spreadsheet virgins use to filter through their Tinder matches identify 1.01-worthy prospects will be satisfied by zero players in this particular crop. Understood.

What that doesn’t mean is that we shouldn’t care about how good the running backs in this class actually are, or that none of them will be valuable – either in lineups or on the trade market – to your dynasty teams. Just consider the field of backs who finished as RB1s or RB2s in the 2023 season: Kyren Williams was a slow, undersized, and inefficient runner taken on day three of the NFL Draft; after spending a season at the JUCO level, Alvin Kamara was the second option in a Tennessee backfield with John Kelly and future wide receiver flameout Jalen Hurd prior to being selected in the third round; the sub-200-pound Raheem Mostert is himself a converted wideout who failed to eclipse even 900 yards from scrimmage over the totality of his career at Purdue before going undrafted back in 2015; De’Von Achane weighs 188 pounds and went in the third round; Rachaad White redshirted at a DII school, spent his sophomore year at Mt. San Antonio Community College, and played only one non-COVID-shortened season at Arizona State before also being taken late in the third round; James Conner missed nearly an entire season to cancer and (though his return and participation were admirable on their own) flunked pre-draft athletic testing before going outside the top-100 picks; Isiah Pacheco averaged fewer than four yards per carry as a senior and was taken just 11 picks before Brock Purdy became Mr. Irrelevant in 2022; David Montgomery ran 4.63 and jumped like he had rocks in his pockets during the 2019 offseason and was eventually taken in the third round; Josh Jacobs was even less athletic than that and never eclipsed more than 900 yards in a season while (at best) operating as Alabama’s RB2; James Cook also was never more than Georgia’s number-two back and weighs less than 200 pounds; Austin Ekeler played at a college you’ve only heard of because of him, is another sub-200-pound guy, and went undrafted; Brian Robinson was a 15th-percentile performer in the jumps and worse in the agility drills after having to wait until his COVID-gifted fifth season of eligibility in order to gain more than 600 yards from scrimmage at Alabama; Tony Pollard is another converted wide receiver who played behind both Darrell Henderson and Patrick Taylor at Memphis before getting taken in the fourth round.

In other words, of the 24 most productive (in terms of per-game PPR output) professional running backs from the most recent season, more than half of them were guys who would have been viewed as having significant warts at the time we were considering their value in rookie drafts (and limiting that count to 13 means ignoring the fact that Christian McCaffrey and Jahmyr Gibbs were undersized, that Travis Etienne and D’Andre Swift were viewed by film-grinders as unpolished, and that Jonathan Taylor and Kenneth Walker were alleged to be poor receivers). I don’t mean to suggest that nobody thought they were good at the time (they all had their individual fan clubs, some more staunch than others), but none of the undeniably useful fantasy assets I’ve listed as part of this group were considered anything close to a “sure” thing back when we were evaluating them as prospects. You could slot the prospect versions of Williams or Mostert or Pacheco or Montgomery or Pollard right into the 2024 running back class and they wouldn’t move the needle much on how consensus is currently viewing it as a whole.

My broad contention here is that – despite the reality that the platonic ideal of a must-have running back prospect is not represented – there are difference-making players to be found in this class, just as there have been among the second, third, and fourth tiers of pretty much every class in recent memory. My contention in this article specifically is that Blake Corum offers us one of the better bets to that end in the 2024 cohort.

Such a take is informed largely by Corum’s skill as a runner, reflected in the rushing efficiency numbers he managed over four years in one of the best conferences in college football:

You likely wouldn’t be alone in thinking there’s a bit less green in this set of metrics than you would’ve expected from a back I’m presenting as one not to be trifled with in this wide open class, but I think I can adequately explain why I’m enthusiastic about Corum despite these somewhat underwhelming numbers. My first reference in that regard would be to his film (which I’ve spoken about several times in the past: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but a closer look at the data also stands on its own. A tweet (from David Zach, who does a lot of good numbers-based prospecting work) that caught my eye as I was preparing to write this article is an excellent jumping off point to that end:

I don’t disagree at all with David’s greater point that an inability to break or evade tackles is a red flag for running back prospects (the numbers speak for themselves), but I do think Corum’s marks beg context. With the inclusion of data from some of the other players David highlighted as having been red flag wavers, I alluded to some of that context myself here:

The suspicion that inspired me to compile that data is exactly what (I think) it reflects: while most of David’s identified non-tackle-breakers had consistently been non-tackle-breakers throughout their college careers (Tyrion Davis-Price and Kevin Harris are the most glaring examples of this), some of them – including Corum – are not so consistent with their evasive failures (I should quickly mention that, whereas David used touches, I used carries as the denominator in my calculations; that distinction seems to make little difference, as indicated by the similarity between the 2023 numbers he and I reached for each of the three guys he referenced in his original tweet). Jerome Ford balled out on 73 carries in 2020 before regressing under workhorse volume in 2021, perhaps suggestive of a ceiling in breather-back territory (his raw and box count-adjusted efficiency numbers fell similarly). Will Shipley started his career with a bang of tackle-breaking dynamism (David says 18% is his minimum threshold and 24% is approximately average) before petering out into a plateau of mediocrity by his final season, a microcosm of his career in general. Corum also started out solid (or excellent, if you want to look at the Pro Football Focus numbers rather than the Sports Info Solutions ones that David uses), basically maintained that level of play for two seasons, and then was notably ineffective in this area in 2023.

I want to hold off on making decisive proclamations about the respective causes of Ford’s and Shipley’s nose-diving marks, but I think we can confidently conclude that the knee injury Corum suffered against Ohio State in November of 2022 is the culprit for his sudden decline in tackle-breaking and elusiveness. His game-by-game and cumulative marks in missed tackles forced per attempt (PFF’s version of this stat) make this abundantly clear:

So, while Corum’s final season numbers show him to be an alarmingly poor tackle-breaker, I don’t think it behooves us to treat him as if those numbers say more about who he is than do his pre-injury numbers (it probably doesn’t make sense either, given the research pointing to year two as the big post-surgery bounceback). At 0.29 MTF per attempt, his cumulative average at the time the ACL tear happened was sitting in the 84th percentile, matching the career marks of Jahmyr Gibbs, Najee Harris, and Jaylen Warren while exceeding those of De’Von Achane, Zach Charbonnet, and Breece Hall. If there’s no reason to expect Corum to have a harder time recovering from his ACL injury and surgery than young backs tend to – and given his impressive 2023 season (tackle-breaking troubles notwithstanding, Corum was an objectively good college running back this year), there might be reason to expect him to have an easier time than most – then it would seem faulty to allow a temporary (and externally-caused) dip in performance take precedent over evaluating the type of player that he is likely to be going forward.

That Corum played as well in 2023 as he did speaks not only to his potential to bounce back fully from this injury, but to the well-roundedness and lack of dependence on athleticism that are present in his game. Despite running into the second-heaviest defensive fronts of any 200+ carry back at the FBS level in the last six years (the 7.38 defenders he faced on his average attempt are fewer than only the 7.47 faced by AJ Dillon in 2019), an injury-slowed Corum posted the following numbers (along with his marks from the previous two years; this table is color-coded by percentile rank among college backs with 100+ carries):

The only aspects of Corum’s game that really took a step back this year were those that most directly reflect athletic ability: breaking and evading tackles, getting yards after contact, and creating explosive plays. His overall efficiency took a dip as a result of a lessened athletic toolkit, but Corum still posted solid marks – especially important in my mind – in both raw and Relative Success Rate.

Shown above is that the most dynamic version of Corum we’ve yet seen – the sprightly sophomore who broke a million tackles, gained nearly four yards after contact per attempt, averaged nearly seven yards per attempt overall, and ripped off chunk runs at a greater rate than either TreVeyon Henderson or Trey Benson did this season – was the least consistent on a down-to-down basis. Despite the lowest marks of his career in average box count (the 6.58 defenders he faced on his mean attempt is below average for high-volume college rushers) and percentage of carries on which he was hit at or before the line of scrimmage (an SIS stat), and despite the fact that his collective backfield teammates succeeded on a greater portion of their attempts than they would in either 2022 or 2023, Corum posted the lowest Success Rate marks of his career, indicating to me that he was thriving mostly by virtue of the explosiveness that clearly shows its face elsewhere in his data profile. By 2023, Corum had matured as a runner to the point that significantly diminishing the weapon he relied on early in his career was not able to render him ineffective. Despite being slowed by a recovering ACL, he served as the engine of an offense (with more touches than all but nine players in the entire country, none of whom were coming off a torn ligament) that would eventually win a National Championship, keeping the offense on schedule while running into the most packed boxes faced by any runner in the nation.

If we evaluate Corum as if he had never sullied his career numbers with his injury-tanked marks from 2023 (whether that entails pretending he declared after last season or pretending he never got hurt and continued playing at his pre-surgery level), his Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating jumps into the 55th-percentile among historical draftees. I believe his film shows him to be much more than the product of a quality offensive line, but those accusations are also silly when you consider Corum’s team-relative efficiency marks in the context of the quality teammates they necessarily frame him against. Donovan Edwards played like shit this season (though it seems that he was also playing hurt), but he and the other Michigan backs are far from a talentless group: they combined to average a 3.51-star rating as high school recruits (a 63rd-percentile number; 4.23 if you consider only the guys on the 2023 team), and Edwards was one of the most explosive backs in recent Power Five history in 2022. If you’re going to posit that Corum is a system running back who we shouldn’t expect to add value on the ground in the NFL, you need to explain how he’s been able (whether healthy or hampered) to consistently outperform a talented group of backfield teammates, not to mention how the pre-injury version of him was able to make Power Five defenders miss at the same rates as did Jahmyr Gibbs and Breece Hall.

I intend on charting another 100+ carries from Corum’s 2023 season before completely settling on a position (I’ll obviously also take into account his combine performance), but as things stand today, I think his evaluation comes down to your level of confidence in his ability to return to pre-injury form. The numbers are good and the film is great (at least in my estimation, but it seems like Matt Waldman is a fan as well), so taking seriously the possibility that Corum looks more going forward like the guy we saw in 2021 and 2022 than the guy we saw in 2023 means taking seriously the possibility that he is a stud running back prospect being devalued based on an injury-slowed final season and concealed within the opacity of a running back class lacking any consensus. If you take a big bong rip, you can even convince yourself that being forced to develop new and more cerebral ways of beating defenses while without access to his full athletic arsenal will result in Corum’s emerging from this process as a better and more complete runner overall. There’s more work to be done, but I don’t think that’s a crazy idea at all.