I exorcized some of my triggered-on-Twitter demons in an apologetics piece on Bucky Irving earlier this week, and today I want to talk more about what interested me in the running back performances at last weekend’s Combine, particularly with five of the most notable players in the class.

We’ll start with MarShawn Lloyd, who – after having been listed at 212 and 210 pounds, respectively, over the last two seasons at South Carolina and USC – showed up at a stout 220 on a 5’9 frame, making him the only back in the class with both workhorse size and a career-best Target Share that lands above the 50th percentile among historical prospects (I know playerprofiler.com has him at a 6.0% mark that puts him in the 39th percentile, but depending on whether you use the 25 targets Pro Football Focus says he had in 2022 or the 27 Sports Info Solutions says he had that year, his share of targets in the nine games he played was either 9.0% or 9.7%, both of which would put him above the historical median). He ran 4.46 in the forty-yard dash at that size, giving him a 93rd-percentile Speed Score and making him one of just 31 runners in the last 18 offseasons to eclipse the 4.50 threshold at 220+. Lloyd also performed well both in the jumps and on the bench, and while he didn’t participate in the agility drills, his film is littered with impressive examples of stop-start ability and dynamic lateral agility:

Lloyd is simply a good and well-rounded athlete, and his top six physical comps (accounting for size and athletic testing numbers) in my database – which includes all draftees since 2007 as well as a smattering of notable undrafted players and historical prospects – are, in order: Damien Williams, Robert Turbin, DeAngelo Williams, Clinton Portis, Julius Jones, and Lamar Miller. We’ll talk more about his on-field ability in a later article, but as was true of most of those comps, Lloyd’s testing results largely translate to in-game situations.

Let’s move on to Blake Corum, who showed up to the Combine at a Devonta Freeman-like 205 pounds at just under 5’8 and put up the second-most bench press reps of any offensive skill position player at the event (27, behind only Illinois tight end Tip Reiman’s 28; Corum has also bested that mark in the past). He’s clearly a gym rat, and while he weighed a respective eight and five fewer pounds last weekend than he was listed at over the last two seasons at Michigan, he still checked in with a 75th-percentile BMI that matches or exceeds those of historical workhorses like Ronnie Brown, Jordan Howard, Kareem Hunt, and Steven Jackson. From a frame standpoint, he’s still well within the Freeman and Maurice Jones-Drew territory we expected him to be in prior to the Combine, and his history of handling a large touchload (and against some of the heaviest defensive fronts seen by any running back in college football) should add to his stoutness in bolstering our confidence in his workhorse potential at the NFL level.

I also don’t think we should be concerned about his athletic ability. Of course it would be nice if Corum had tested like Jerick McKinnon, but the things we should be asking ourselves about anyone’s athletic testing results are 1) do they align with what the player showed on tape?, and 2) in conjunction with that tape, do they raise red flags about the player’s ability to translate his collegiate success to the NFL game?

To question #1, I think the answer with Corum is clearly “yes”. He displayed some higher-end speed as a 200-pound underclassman (and hit 4.44 in the forty as a 193-pound high school kid), but even acknowledging that his breakaway burst in the last couple seasons never seemed elite, the common pre-Combine sentiment that held Corum to be a “slow” running back was always silly. He hit the mid-20-MPH range on multiple runs in 2023 (see: 1, 2), completely adequate speeds that align well with the above-average time he posted during his 40-yard dash.

Along with decent speed, Corum’s film is filled with evidence of exciting short-area burst and lateral quickness:

Outside of his impressive cerebral ability at the line of scrimmage, that quickness might be the defining characteristic of Corum’s game, and it certainly showed at the Combine. His showing in the position drills provided some evidence of it (as his above-average vertical leap provided evidence of the explosiveness apparent in his tape), but the times he posted in the three-cone and 20-yard shuttle each landed in at least the 90th percentile among historical prospects. Since 2007, an average of just 1.06 drafted backs per year have had a better Agility Score than the one Corum produced last weekend, and among those whose marks he bested are some of the quickest and most elusive runners in recent history: McKinnon, LeSean McCoy, Aaron Jones, Jamaal Charles, LaDainian Tomlinson, Matt Forte, Miles Sanders, and more.

My answer to question #1 has naturally leaked over into the territory belonging to question #2, but you won’t be surprised to find that I don’t believe Corum’s Combine performance should have raised red flags about his ability to succeed in the league. The value of Speed Score is what it is because it’s good to be both big and fast, but while Corum’s size limits him in some respects relative to bigger players, you’re not allowed to think he’s literally too slow for the NFL unless you also believe that of Giovani Bernard, Austin Ekeler, Zach Charbonnet, Derrick Henry, Alvin Kamara, Jay Ajayi, Brian Westbrook, Chris Carson, and countless other effective professional runners who traveled from point A to point B no faster than Corum did during their own pre-Draft 40-yard dashes. Like Corum, some of those guys were also not particularly big either at the time those dashes were run or during their NFL careers.

In short, Corum’s speed, strength, density, explosiveness, and especially quickness are all above average among the historical population of NFL runners. His top-eight athletic comps in my database (without skipping anyone) are Duke Johnson, Chase Edmonds, Marlon Mack, Kenjon Barner, Miles Sanders, Evan Royster, Doug Martin, and Giovani Bernard, and if we also account for size, his top-three physical comps are Johnson, Edmonds, and Bernard. From a subjective standpoint, I’d also say the careers of guys like Aaron Jones, Devonta Freeman, Khalil Herbert, and Jaylen Warren – all of whom entered the league with 4.55+ speed at no taller than 5’9 and while weighing between 206 and 210 pounds – can reasonably serve as precedent for someone who looks and moves like Corum getting significant work and producing RB2- or even RB1-level fantasy numbers in the NFL.

Let’s move on to a guy who really did run slowly at the Combine. Answering our two earlier questions in ways that shed light positively on a guy that finished his 40-yard dash in 4.71 seconds is not as easy as with someone who finished it in 4.53, and as a result, Audric Estime is necessarily moving down my rookie running back rankings. Still, I think we can justify optimism about his prospects as a future NFL contributor (and fantasy asset) without simply burying our heads in the sand about a lackluster forty time.

First, the kids who sit at the cool table in the film grinders’ cafeteria seem to not care that Estime ran a slow forty (see: 1, 2) and are content with defaulting to the speed he showed on tape:

Their enthusiasm doesn’t mean anything on its own, but it is true that Estime a) reached speeds during live game situations that indicate he’s faster than his poor testing times would suggest, b) was a big-time creator of chunk plays and a completely fine creator of breakaway runs during his career at Notre Dame, and c) wouldn’t be the first slow running back to achieve success at the NFL level. Here’s a quick list of semi-recent prospects who posted times at least as slow as Estime’s on either their overall 40-yard dash or in the flying-20 portions of those runs (which measures how fast a player runs the final 20 yards of his forty, theoretically capturing him at full speed and without the influence of the technique-heavy 10-yard split):

And the following players posted marks in one or more those areas that were no more than five one-hundredths of a second faster than Estime’s:

All of the players on both of those lists were notably slow at the Combine and went on to become anywhere from solid role players to elite runners in the NFL, and while I’m obviously cherry-picking good names here, the point is that guys whose foot speed compares closely to Estime’s are not necessarily doomed to professional failure. Several of the backs I’ve listed compare closely to Estime in a stylistic sense as well: Morris, Jacobs, Stevenson, Howard, Conner, and Greene all strike me as belonging to a similar archetype of big, nimple thumper that Estime belongs to.

As another plus, Estime displayed a good level of explosiveness via his performance in the jumps. His 87th-percentile Burst Score is greater than the marks posted by Lloyd and Trey Benson in this class as well as the one posted by Bijan Robinson at last year’s Combine (and for what it’s worth, that burst shows up on tape). Unless our definition of “athleticism” is narrow enough that it refers only to a player’s top speed, Estime can’t reasonably be said to be an “unathletic” running back. He’s not a blazer, but I don’t think we should be burying the Notre Dame workhorse on the basis of an ugly forty time. The burden of proof for the rest of his profile has simply risen, and – based on his efficiency numbers and the three games of film that I’ve watched so far (which I will speak on in a coming article) – I’m not convinced that he doesn’t meet it.

I want to finish this piece by quickly talking about two players whose Combine performances don’t need defending. Jaylen Wright ran 4.38 and jumped out of the gym, and at 5’10 4/8 and 210 pounds (which is the exact height and only one pound away from what I projected for him on February 29th), his top-ten physical comps in my database are Jerick McKinnon, Ahman Green, Adrian Peterson, Godwin Igwebuike, Tre Mason, Tony Pollard, Charles Sims, Rachaad White, Joe Williams, and Joseph Addai. I will remind you, however, that we already knew he was an elite athlete prior to his testing, as well as that – at least in my opinion – the crux of his evaluation is not athleticism but a Schrodinger’s cat situation with his ability to read defenses at the line of scrimmage (owing to the very light box counts he ran against at Tennessee). In other words, it’s nice to have a sexy number to point at when discussing how fast he is or how high he jumps, but the availability of those things doesn’t really add much to our understanding of his ability to succeed in the NFL.

Trey Benson came into Indianapolis at 216 pounds and also managed to break the 4.4 threshold in the forty-yard dash, making him one of just eleven backs in the last fifteen years to have done so at 215+. I’m not sure we learned a ton about him, either, but my conviction in a comp I posed in early February has grown as a result of Benson’s athletic testing results.

Benson’s closest physical comps in my database are Zamir White, Deneric Prince, Kenneth Walker, Matt Forte, and Matt Weber, and the Walker parallels are notable given the two backs have strong stylistic similarities on top of their analogous athletic profiles. We know they both broke tackles and produced big plays at high rates in college, and while Walker’s efficiency profile from his days at Wake Forest and Michigan State did not reveal a high level of down-to-down inconsistency, his film and statistical output thus far in the NFL have both clearly skewed in that direction. He frequently bails on structure to swing for home runs and seek out bounce opportunities, and though his elite athleticism often allows him to get away with those chicken-with-its-head-cut-off tendencies, his Success Rate numbers have suffered as a result of that stylistic bent. Benson does many of the same things, and measures of his per-play consistency do reflect the same type of boom/bust outcomes (especially in 2023). He’s shown more three-down utility than Walker ever did in college, but I anticipate Benson being a similarly exciting and frustrating runner at the NFL level as the former Spartan has been through two seasons.

We’ll talk about Combine results for some of the less-heralded backs in this class early next week.