Nobody cares about Chris Rodriguez, Jr., and I’m here to change that. Normally, overlooked players in a particular position group of a Draft class fall into one of a few different categories: the late boomers, the non-producers, the undersized, and the Group of 5 or even FCS heroes -- guys whose profiles just very obviously don’t fit the mold of what we’re typically looking for.

Rodriguez, however, does not fall into any of those categories. He redshirted during his first season on campus at Kentucky due to the presence of junior running back Benny Snell atop the Wildcats’ depth chart (and while Snell hasn’t turned into much in the NFL, he was a fourth-round pick who ran for 1000 yards in three straight seasons in the SEC), but Rodriguez entered the team’s rotation with over 500 yards on the ground as a second-year back, and then followed up that campaign with 35.8% Dominator Rating (and 84th-percentile mark for juniors among backs drafted since 2007) in the COVID-affected 2020 season, giving him a perfectly average year-three breakout. He then averaged over 100 rushing yards per game over the next two seasons. He’s obviously been productive, he wasn’t really a late bloomer, he played against the best possible competition in college football, and as a guy who’s been listed at at least 218 pounds since he was a true freshman, Rodriguez is also not undersized. So what gives?

On top of being a fifth-year declare -- and this next part is a little ridiculous -- I think Rodriguez suffers in the minds of evaluators (casual and not) because of his perceived similarities to the underwhelming Snell. It’s not hard to fall into that trap: Snell was always listed right around 220 pounds in college, and so was Rodriguez, Snell was a 1000-yard rusher, and so was Rodriguez, Snell never caught more than 17 passes in a single season at Kentucky, and Rodriguez never caught more than 13. These are all fairly superficial similarities, but when we’re putting players into general buckets of interesting, not interesting, or fringey when we start the process of evaluating a particular class, these superficialities are how we make our initial determinations.

While he hasn’t done much in the NFL, Benny Snell left Kentucky as the school’s all-time leading rusher after just three seasons.

In this particular case, however, I think the Snell-Rodriguez link is almost completely superficial -- it simply doesn’t extend to their respective athletic profiles or to their respective degrees of on-field success as ball-carriers. Snell was famously unathletic at the Combine, running a 4.66 in the forty-yard dash (a 10th-percentile time), jumping just 29.5 inches in the vertical leap (a mark that some of the readers of this article can likely clear), and posting an Agility Score in the 43rd percentile among backs drafted since 2007.

Rodriguez, on the other hand, while not a world-beater as an athlete, is markedly more impressive in that area than Snell was:

A 4.52 forty is above-average for any running back, but it’s legitimately impressive for a guy at Rodriguez’s size (it produces a 60th-percentile Speed Score, whereas Snell’s came in at just the 26th percentile). It is true that that’s where Rodriguez’s athletic strengths end, but he’s hardly a clean comparison for a guy like Snell who -- at least according to the tests performed at the NFL Combine -- didn’t come into the league with any athletic traits that were even average for a professional runner. Indeed, out of 473 backs in my database, Snell ranks 227th in the strength of his similarity to Rodriguez purely as an athlete, with his match to his fellow Kentucky alum in that area essentially as weak as Christian McCaffrey’s (78.8% to 78.5%).

In addition to boasting a meal-ticket athletic trait where Snell did not, Rodriguez also leaves college with a significantly more impressive on-field profile than Snell left with:

This is where the Snell comparison loses all semblance of utility, to the point where I feel silly for even having framed this article around it. Snell played only one collegiate season in the box-count adjusted efficiency metrics era (2018-), during which he posted an atrocious Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 76.3% to go with an abysmal Relative Success Rate of -5.4%. That first mark was easily the lowest among lead backs in the SEC in 2018 (with Tim Jordan’s 90.4% mark a distant second-worst), and beats out the marks of only three SEC lead runners in the last five years (2019 Scottie Phillips, 2019 Asim Rose, and 2020 Isaiah Spiller), while that RSR lands in the 28th percentile among college runners in the same time-frame. For his career, Snell averaged 1.6 yards per carry less than what the other backs at Kentucky produced, and he ripped off 10-yard chunk gains 1.9% less often than they did, marks in the 2nd (!!) and 19th percentiles, respectively, among eventual NFL draftees.

Given Rodriguez’s legitimately impressive efficiency profile, comparing him to Snell because they’re about the same size and went to the same school is like fading Travis Etienne because Wayne Gallman wasn’t very good a few years prior. That’s not to say that Rodriguez is on the same level that Etienne was as a prospect (he’s not close), but the work he put on the field at Kentucky deserves much more consideration in this running back class than it has received.

The only player in my database whose entire college career took place in the box-count metrics era and whose career mark in RSR is higher than Rodriguez’s is Chuba Hubbard, who was one of the most dynamic college runners we’ve ever seen during a sensational 2019 season in which he finished fourth in Heisman Trophy voting. Rodriguez’s mark in this area is not just the product of a single dominant season, either: from 2019 to 2022, his seasonal RSRs never dipped below 7.0%, an 82nd-percentile figure that matches Devon Achane’s career total in the metric.

On top of producing arguably the most dependable and consistent output on a per-carry basis of any college back of the last half-decade, Rodriguez also generated explosive plays and produced efficiently overall. His Chunk Rate+ and Breakaway Conversion Rate marks are not awesome, but they’re above-average among NFL-quality college backs, and similar to his seasonal RSR figures, Rodriguez’s seasonal BAE Ratings never dipped below a 122.2% mark that lands in the 65th percentile and exceeds the career totals of 2023 classmates like Zach Charbonnet, Kendre Miller, Sean Tucker, and Bijan Robinson:

On top of all that, Rodriguez’s propensity for breaking tackles is borderline elite, as his per-attempt numbers in that area match those of notorious MTF maven Zack Moss and exceed those of other powerful backs in this class like Charbonnet, Tank Bigsby, and Zach Evans.

At the end of the day, Rodriguez is big, he’s fast, he sheds tacklers, he produces efficiently, and he churns out positive yards on a more consistent basis than pretty much anyone to come out of college in the last five years. I’m a little wary of the two-down-SEC-workhorse-who-doesn’t-get-a-lot-of-scouting-buzz archetype after the Kevin Harris experience from a year ago, but if I acknowledge getting out over my skis a little bit on that one (and to be fair, Harris’ career isn’t over, and who knows how things would’ve turned out for him if he hadn’t gotten hurt at the end of his dominant sophomore season), I think it’s okay to also acknowledge that Rodriguez’s complete lack of hype in this year’s pre-Draft process makes little sense given how objectively effective he was a college rusher in the best conference in the country. He’s not Nick Chubb, but it’s time for us to stop treating Chris Rodriguez like Benny Snell redux.