Zach Evans affinity notwithstanding, my general stance on running back evaluation is that players should ideally have good size and the ability to add value in the passing game, and should at least have one or the other. Those two things are not sufficient requirements for success in the NFL, but relatively speaking, guys who have both have high floors and high ceilings because they meet the minimum criteria for being able to contribute on all three downs, or, more specifically, to contribute in the areas that are most valuable in fantasy football: on passing downs and at the goalline. Runners with good size but no receiving chops can still get volume and short touchdown opportunities, and undersized backs who have receiving chops can still be productive in the passing game. However, a running back who lacks both size and receiving skills is like an undersized center with no jump shot. They better be damn good at pretty much everything else required of their position or they probably won’t see much playing time; the standard for earning opportunities when you’re a player of those archetypes isn’t insurmountable, but it’s higher than for most.

Because of that, I previously had not paid much mind to Chase Brown. I didn’t necessarily believe he was a bad player, but Brown was listed at 5’11 and 205 pounds in college. That’s not tiny, but 205 is in the 26th-percentile for running back prospects going back to 2007, and the 206 pounds that historical weight gain patterns for those prospects indicated that Brown would likely weigh obviously isn’t much better. On top of that, 5’11 is above-average height for NFL running backs, and while light weight isn’t so bad when it manifests as stoutness on a shorter body, light weight manifesting as skinniness on a disproportionately tall body isn’t ideal.

Even so, such measurables are not a death sentence for pro runners when accompanied by the appropriate skill-set, and my disinterest in Brown was borne of the confluence of that supposed undersizedness and apparently mediocre receiving chops. I still have yet to do much close work on Brown’s pass-catching abilities (so I reserve the right to change my mind in this area), but the numbers didn’t and still don’t stand out to me. What has changed, however, is Brown’s status as a lightweight.

Turns out Chase Brown is more similar to the 5’9, 209-pound JK Dobbins than he is to taller and slimmer backs like Ronald Jones and Tevin Coleman.

The Illinois and Western Michigan product showed up to the Senior Bowl at 5’9 ½” and an astounding 215 pounds before slimming back down to 209 for the Combine, but either way, with more pounds and fewer inches than we thought he had, Brown is now a solidly-built welterweight in the same mold as runners like JK Dobbins, Jerick McKinnon, and Aaron Jones. Those measurables solidify him as a guy to care about in this running back class, and that’s even before you consider how Brown tore up the athletic tests in Indianapolis:

Without skipping any names, these are the ten historical prospects in my database who performed most similarly to Chase Brown in the above athletic tests:

If you account for Brown’s size on top of his impressive athletic testing, the ten players with the most similar overall physical profiles to his are Tre Mason, Donald Brown, Joseph Addai, Bishop Sankey, Tony Pollard, and Edgerrin James in addition to McKinnon, Green, Peterson, and Hall.

Basically, running backs who are built and move like Brown are often studs in the NFL. We obviously shouldn’t have Hall of Fame- or even Pro Bowl-sized expectations for most players, and Brown’s profile isn’t perfect, but guys on this list like McKinnon and Scott were mid-to-late round selections who’ve earned legitimate roles for multiple years on professional offenses with physical traits very similar to what Brown enters the league with.

If Brown is to do the same, he’ll likely need to prove to be a quality runner of the football, and I think our best indication of his potential in that area is what he put on wax as a ball-carrier in college:

If I’m allowed to have stylistic preferences, the shape of Chase Brown’s rushing efficiency profile is one that I have an affinity for. It’s true that he ran into much lighter defensive fronts than what his teammates faced, but Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating is box-adjusted, so we know that he was significantly more impressive on a per-carry basis than his backfield mates were even accounting for that relative ease of travel. On top of that, his efficiency did not come via infrequent long runs, but was earned on a down-to-down basis with consistent output that was rewarded with frequent explosive plays.

Brown gained the third-fewest portion of his total 2022 rushing yards in the open field among this year’s running back class -- you’d like him to be perform a bit better at the second and third levels of the defense, but I’ll take that issue over a guy who’s great in the open field but can’t hardly get there. I often wax disparagingly about runners who place highly on the Volatility Index, and Brown’s output couldn’t be further from that: he’s at just an 11.5, putting him in the same range as high-floor, low-ceiling runners like Damien Harris, Tyler Allgeier, and Najee Harris.

There are only five other guys in this class who leave college with BAE Rating and RSR marks in the top third of historical prospects -- Keaton Mitchell, Devon Achane, DeWayne McBride, Chris Rodriguez, and Tiyon Evans -- and only Mitchell among those five enters the NFL with a higher CR+ mark (9.8%) than Brown’s. He looks like a full-package runner minus the lack of success in the open field, though subpar missed tackles forced numbers are the other knock on him here. The 59th percentile doesn’t look bad, but that actually lands in about the 44th percentile since what I believe to have been a significant change in the way Pro Football Focus tracks the metric.

Zach Evans and Keaton Mitchell are the only running backs in this class with higher career Chunk Rate+ marks than Chase Brown.

In that case, Brown is a bit of an enigma. If you told me a back produced a 67th-percentile RSR but was below and well below average as a tackle-breaker and open field runner, respectively, I would guess that player was a Brian Robinson- or Josh Jacobs-style runner who is tough and dependable between the tackles but may lack some of the athletic juice necessary for long, flashy runs. But Brown is a workout warrior (he put up 25 reps at 225 pounds on the bench at the Combine, an 88th-percentile performance) and athletic freak, so you’d think he’d run more like the Jerick McKinnon- or Tony Pollard-type space backs that appear on his comps lists.

In the same way that the physical comp uses size and athleticism to find similar historical prospects to a given player, we can use a player’s physical profile in tandem with his rushing efficiency profile in order to find historical backs who were most similar to the player in question as pure runners. By that measure and in the Chunk Rate+ era (I have those numbers for as far back as the 2010 class), here are Brown’s closest comps:

Here, it looks like our best expectations for the kind of runner Brown will be stylistically should be somewhere between the almost-big-enough satellite back and jack-of-all-trades utility player archetypes, and I think that makes sense. Perhaps he’s like a Chase Edmonds (who played at the FCS level in college and therefore does not have the metrics necessary for eligibility in the above list), an undersized but effective runner and undynamic but competent pass-catcher.

In a composite rating based on all the rushing efficiency metrics shared in this article in addition to the contextual factors surrounding them (teammate talent, overall team quality, volume, level of competition, etc.), Brown scores a 61.4 out of 100, good for the sixth-highest mark in this class (behind Mitchell, Achane, Rodriguez, McBride, and Tyjae Spears) and the third-highest among backs from Power 5 schools (behind Achane and Rodriguez). On the all-time leaderboard, that number puts him right between Matt Breida (at 61.6) and Jeremy McNichols (61.3), a duo that somehow feels right given Brown’s apparent range of outcomes.

The side of the Breida-McNichols line that I end up landing on with Brown will largely be informed by the questions answered and insights gained from supplementing his analytical profile with film study. I finished watching and charting 118 of his carries less than a week ago, and my exploration into the results of that process will be delivered to you on these airwaves in just two short days.