There seems to be a disconnect between the expectations of those in fantasy football land and those in the general football media sphere regarding Mar’Keise “Bucky” Irving’s potential at the next level; campus2canton.com has Irving ranked as their devy RB47, Cory Pereira listed the Oregon runner as a “sell high” candidate in this fantasypros.com article, the Dynasty Nerds have him at RB20, The Undroppables have him at RB53, and so on, while non-fantasy outlets like nfldraftbuzz.com, profootballnetwork.com, and Pro Football Focus all have Irving ranked inside their top-10 backs in the upcoming 2024 draft class.

Part of that disparity is attributable to the simple difference in goals for those respective sources: the fantasy guys want to find the players who will score the most fantasy points, and the non-fantasy guys just want to find the best football players, whatever that means. I think, though, that in regards to the running back position in particular, we should all be generally on the same page, and that’s simply not the case in this instance. Prior to writing this article I had Irving at RB40 in my devy rankings, so it’s not as if I’m way off base from where my fantasy-focused brethren typically land on the dynamic Duck, but given the quality reputation he has in the “real” football scouting spaces, the lack of familiarity I have with his on-field game (the only all-22 Irving film I know to be available are the 2022 games against Georgia, Utah, and Oregon State that saw him average a collective 3.04 yards on just 28 carries, so I’ve held off on grinding the tape until I can find a sample that strikes me as a fairer representation of his skills), and my historical affinity for undersized running backs (Kenneth Gainwell, De’Von Achane, etc.), I figured a numbers-based dive into his profile was in order.

We just saw him turn four carries into 119 yards in Oregon’s 81-7 season-opening win over Portland State yesterday, but the following marks in the various rushing efficiency metrics I like to look at were totaled using Irving’s combined performance from his first two seasons in college:

I’ll say it now: I don’t think Irving will ever contribute heavily as a ball-carrier in the NFL. Historical weight gain patterns indicate that he’s likely to measure in at 5’9 ½ and 200 pounds during his eventual pre-Draft process, his list of closest athletic comps over at campus2canton.com contains zero players who became NFL draftees, and the above numbers are just not good relative to how quality NFL running backs typically perform in college.

It is true that Irving’s raw efficiency numbers are much better than the above team-relative marks. He currently has a career average of 6.1 yards per carry, which is close to the 80th percentile among historical prospects according to playerprofiler.com, and he averaged 6.8 at Oregon last season. Still, it’s my job to separate player performance from environmental helps and hazards, and Irving has undeniably benefited from strong offensive line play thus far in his career. PFF graded Oregon’s run-blocking unit as the nation’s 24th-best in 2022 after grading Minnesota’s line (Irving entered college as a Golden Gopher) as the country’s fourth-best run-blocking group in 2021. On top of that, Irving has run against relatively light defensive fronts to date: last season saw him face an average of just 6.50 men in the box on his carries, which ranked 98th out of 162 backs with at least 100 rushing attempts, and in 2021, he faced an average of 6.60 box defenders, also below the national mean.

In the context of the Oregon and Minnesota offenses, that lack of defensive attention has given Irving a huge boost. In 2021, he averaged 0.33 yards per carry greater than the other backs on the team while seeing 0.43 fewer men in the box on his average carry than his teammates did, a disparity that lands in the fourth percentile among all runners with at least ten carries in any of the last five collegiate seasons. At Oregon last year, Irving averaged 1.45 yards per carry greater than his backfield mates while seeing 0.30 fewer men in the box on his attempts than they did on theirs, itself a 10th-percentile difference. There have been literally zero running backs drafted since box count data became available (going back to 2018) who enjoyed defensive fronts as relatively light (in terms of intra-team comparisons) during their college careers as those Irving ran into as an underclassman.

Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating lets us skip that whole dance between team-relative yards per carry and team-relative box counts and cut right to the chase, and in this case it shows us that the average Irving carry has been worth 110.6% the output of an average carry from the collective “other” backs on his college teams thus far, and worth 119.5% that output in 2022 alone. That first mark is not good, but the latter is close to what we want to see out of legitimate NFL prospects: solid pro running backs like Cam Akers, AJ Dillon, and D’Andre Swift all left college with career BAE Ratings around the 120% mark, and promising young runners like Will Shipley, Kendre Miller, and Blake Corum who we haven’t yet seen play in the league also have career marks in the same range.

D’Andre Swift is another talented space back who posted a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 120.6% at Georgia.

As you might expect from a sub-200-pound tailback, however, Irving’s to-date mark in Relative Success Rate is both not good and not unduly influenced by a low freshman number that he has since improved upon (as is more the case with his BAE Rating). He has underperformed the other backs in his offenses in terms of consistent, down-to-down rushing output in both of his college seasons, meaning his value as a runner has been somewhat volatile and largely fueled by relatively infrequent chunk gains. He’s been good at producing those through two seasons, but Irving is strangely not great in the open field, at least in terms of converting those semi-explosive plays into longer, breakaway runs further downfield. His Breakaway Conversion Rate sits in just the 27th percentile right now, and @bigWRguy on Twitter has clocked Irving’s in-game speed at just 20.2 miles per hour, a pace that matches those of noted burners like CJ Donaldson, Tavorus Jones, and Jordan Anderson. PFF’s missed tackles forced metric and the YouTube highlight tapes show Irving to be a spunky and elusive runner out in space, but he’s small, not particularly fast, doesn’t produce positive outcomes at a consistent rate, and isn’t notably efficient given the context of the offenses in which he has operated. Hopefully Irving can further improve upon his career numbers during his second season as a Duck, but right now and purely as a runner, his similarities to other undersized backs like Gainwell and Achane -- who were both incredibly efficient in college -- start and end with the dual factoids that they are each a) small, and b) fun to watch.

Things look a little different for Irving’s potential to contribute as a receiver at the next level. To start, he caught 31 passes for 299 yards last season, landing in the top-25 in both categories among all FBS runners. His to-date marks in yards per target and catch rate both eclipse the 70th percentiles among historical NFL prospects, and the way he’s been used as a receiver is encouraging for projecting him as a dynamic satellite back at the next level. After a freshman season that saw him run just 20 routes in a ground-based offense at Minnesota, Oregon coaches unleashed Irving on Pac-12 linebackers, using him heavily on angle routes and splitting him out wide or in the slot on nearly 35% of his passing-down snaps. As his career numbers stood prior to the start of the 2023 season, Irving had been deployed somewhere other than the backfield on passing plays at a higher rate than James Cook, Kenneth Gainwell, Christian McCaffrey, and -- save for Wendell Smallwood (who beats out Irving by 0.1% in this area) and a smattering of hybrid runner/receivers like Tony Pollard and Nyheim Hines -- every other running back drafted since PFF started tracking alignment data for college players.

Wendell Smallwood was used dynamically on his way to catching 68 passes in three seasons at West Virginia.

From those positions, Irving has frequently run drag and slant routes (in addition to the angle routes that Irving also specializes in, these make up three of the top-five most valuable routes on the running back tree in terms of NFL-wide yards per route run), and his overall route inventory is impressive in both its scope and the level of skill it requires of him. The Route Diversity he posted last season lands in the 91st percentile and ranked 14th -- including ahead of Jahmyr Gibbs -- among 118 collegiate backs with at least 100 routes run, and only three runners in the same group had basic, checkdown-type pass patterns make up a smaller portion of their overall route tree than they accounted for with Irving (Gibbs and Deuce Vaughn were among the 115 guys who ran advanced route types less often than Irving did last season). He also wasn’t just running wind sprints out there: on a per-route basis, Irving was targeted well above the FBS mean on angles, drags, and slants, and nearly 35% more often than would be expected based on route-specific, nation-wide targets-per-route-run data across his entire route tree, producing a Route-Adjusted Target Earnings mark in the 75th percentile (in other words: where the average college running back would be targeted 100 times on X amount of routes, Irving is targeted 135 times on that same route volume).

The only flaw I see in Irving’s receiving profile (at least through a data-centric lens) is a lack of pass-protection experience: PFF has him down for just 39 such reps so far in his career, while guys like Gainwell, Achane, Vaughn, and Gibbs left school with between 79 (a mark that Gainwell reached in essentially one season at Memphis) and 133. Hope for Irving’s third-down potential in spite of that inexperience comes in two forms: 1) a somewhat similar prospect in James Cook finished up four years at Georgia with just 47 pass pro snaps, and 2) PFF currently has Irving with a career pass-blocking grade of 60.7, which is solid (for reference, Najee Harris and Brian Robinson left Alabama with grades of 55.4 and 59.8, respectively). Irving will undoubtedly be more of a pass-receiver than he is a pass-protector at the next level, but blocking is an underappreciated barrier to playing time for many talented young running backs (but maybe just underappreciated by me), so it’s worth keeping an eye on his progress in that area.

I’d like to hold off on definite declarations about Irving’s NFL potential until his college career is finished (and until I’m able to study some of his good film), but I think it’s fair to hope for some Gainwell-type contributions from him as a professional. I don’t think he’s at Memphis Gainwell’s level as a runner right now, but he’s a slick receiver who’s hard to tackle out in space, and that can earn you playing time on an NFL offense (see: Cohen, Tarik). I’m not moving him up the devy ranks (mostly because I’m already -- though accidentally -- slightly high on him compared to the other devy services), but I wouldn’t be surprised if Irving’s dynamism allows him to punch above his weight class (literally and figuratively) in garnering some fourth- or fifth-round draft capital next spring.