I’m here to rant and rave about weigh-ins and athletic testing results, probably in a short series of articles outlining my thoughts on this weekend’s Combine. We’ll start on that project with Bucky Irving, who I think provides a good jumping-off point for me to discuss how I view athletic testing and its importance to evaluations, comparisons, and projections in general.

As we know, Irving was not particularly impressive in any of the measured aspects of his Combine performance. He weighed in at 192 pounds – three fewer than he’d been listed at on Oregon’s roster in 2023 – and posted a 4.55-second 40-yard dash and sub-20th-percentile marks in both of the jumping events (quick note: unless otherwise pointed out, the percentile ranks I reference in this article are generated in my local database, which consists of every back drafted since 2007 as well as some recent or particularly notable undrafted prospects and random players from further back in history). His combination of size and speed produces a Speed Score – the holy grail of made-up football numbers – that lands in just the 27th percentile (according to playerprofiler.com). It’s good to be big and it’s good to be fast, and Irving is neither. I don’t think that means we should abandon ship, though.

For one, Bucky’s poor RAS and SPORQ numbers have been generated without the aid of what are likely to be his best athletic traits: quickness, lateral agility, and balance.

The last of those is not something the Combine has a test for, but it’s clearly something that is a big part of Irving’s on-field arsenal. The first two are tested in the 20-yard shuttle and three-cone drills, which the former Duck seems to not have participated in. If he had, we might be looking at a RAS card with a yellow number at the top and a big pocket of green in the southeast corner. The fact that he didn’t participate in those tests doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give him evaluative credit for those traits being a part of his skill-set, which producing athleticism scores using only the testing results available to us necessarily entails. I want to be clear that this isn’t some crusade against athleticism scores (I have a version of my own, and I can obviously only use the available results as well), but rather against willful ignorance: Bucky Irving is quick and has fantastic balance, and while his Combine performance provided no hard proof of those things, we don’t have to act like the latter truth invalidates the former. If De’Von Achane had participated in the jumps and agility drills but not run the forty a year ago, it would have been silly to operate on the assumption that he was an historically bad athlete given that we still knew he was good at the thing he (hypothetically) didn’t test in:

The same is true of Irving running and jumping but not participating in agility drills.

My second point on this issue is that Irving is not actually slow. It’s obvious that plenty of backs have succeeded in the NFL – and not been particularly slow runners while doing so – after posting 40-yard dash times of 4.55 or worse, and this truth runs the gamut of running back body types: Ahmad Bradshaw, Jaylen Warren, Doug Martin, Steven Jackson, Aaron Jones, and Ricky Williams represent an eclectic collection of just a few of them. When considered alongside his diminutive size, Irving’s speed isn’t particularly impressive, nor does it inspire physics-fueled thoughts of the kind of run-through-a-brick-wall force that, for example, Jonathan Taylor’s 4.39 at 226 pounds might, but 4.55 speed is hardly something that represents a deficiency in a running back’s actual on-field tool-kit. This entire line of reasoning also ignores that we have ample evidence of Irving displaying more-than-adequate speed with pads on, while holding a football, and against actual defenders in a live setting:

Lastly on the Bucky beat, I want to digress momentarily on the “show the whole data set” sentiment in regards to pointing out that other players with similar levels of athleticism have been productive NFL backs in the past:

That response speaks to a reasonable desire to not have cherry-picked comparisons wag the dog of a player’s evaluation, and I empathize with that desire: pointing out that Davante Adams sucked as a rookie or that Josh Allen was out of control in college or that Kyren Williams was small and slow at the Combine is a terrible justification for believing in some random player who happens to have disappointed in a similar way. The “whole data set” clearly shows you that wide receivers who suck as rookies or quarterbacks who are out of control in college or running backs who are both small and slow have low odds of success and should generally be faded as a result. As Jakob Sanderson points out, however, I’m not attempting to circumvent that rule by pointing out “exceptions” to it, because every small and slow running back in recent prospecting history is not necessarily relevant to Irving’s evaluation just by virtue of the fact that he is also small and slow (assuming we’re even calling him slow).

The first and foremost thing that should be considered when projecting any player to the NFL is how good they were in college. As Irving was a notably productive and effective player over the last two years at Oregon – he gained nearly 3000 yards, scored 21 touchdowns, forced missed tackles at a 98th-percentile per-attempt rate, averaged almost seven yards per touch, and impressed a variety of prominent film evaluators (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) – the guys whose similarities to him begin and end with stature and tested athleticism are hardly relevant. Accounting for the (relative) professional failures of Pete Guerriero, Raheem Blackshear, Taquan Mizzell, Jerrion Ealy, Marcus Murphy, or JJ Taylor – all of whom are among Irving’s top-fifteen physical comps in my database – when calibrating your expectations for Bucky’s NFL career means ignoring the fact that none of them were even remotely as close to as good as he was – a second-team All-Pac-12 honoree and dynamic lead back on nationally-contending Duck squads – at the level of competition at which he played. Similarly, it would be speculative nearly to the point of absurdity to cast such a wide net as to include – despite stylistic and athletic similarities – players like LeSean McCoy in our pool of guys-who-should-inform-our-Irving-expectations. Shady ran 4.50 in the forty (which playerprofiler.com would tell you should be corrected to 4.55) while weighing 198 pounds at his pro day (and – based on the best current info – cruised the final 20 yards of that dash in the same 1.91 seconds that Irving did his), was terrible in the jumps, and posted excellent marks in the agility drills. That’s a pretty Bucky-esque physical profile, but then again McCoy’s team-relative rushing efficiency and market share production numbers were (if you look at Yards Per Carry+ and Dominator Rating) around two and three times better, respectively, than those Irving managed at Oregon. It doesn’t make sense to discount Irving because a clearly-worse Ealy ended up with a lackluster NFL career in the same way that it wouldn’t make sense to justify being in on him because a clearly-better Shady bore some stylistic similarities.

Because of that, I don’t find it helpful to limit our scope to undersized-backs-who-ran-mid-4.5s, spit out some 18% hit rate of RB2-level producers (or whatever it would be), and call it a day. Instead, I want to identify guys who a) were similarly sized, b) tested similarly, and c) gave us similar reasons to be excited about their on-field ability during college, and then use those players as our guiding light for what to expect – or hope for – from Irving at the next level. That’s why past prospects like James White, Theo Riddick, Dion Lewis, and Andre Ellington are of particular interest: they were all small, they were all kinda slow and not super athletic, they were all productive and effective at quality Power Five programs (though not to the extreme degree that McCoy was), and – most importantly – they all sprouted from similar branches of the running back family tree as the one Irving appears to sprout from. I don’t want to suggest that their similarity to Irving means he’s destined for RB1- or RB2-level production in the NFL – both the state of the league and my as-yet incomplete evaluation of him are undecided on that front – but they provide the blueprint for what success at the next level might look like for him.

It matters that he’s small, it matters that he doesn’t have world class long speed, and it matters that he can’t jump out of the gym, but those facts should serve more of an explanatory and contextualizing role in Irving’s evaluation than they do a disqualifying one. There’s a difference between saying “he was X good but has Y athleticism”, and “he was X good with Y athleticism”. However his individual career turns out, it’s clear that guys who move and play like Bucky does can excel in the NFL.