Free agency has started and I’m here to continue talking about the Combine (not sorry). We covered Bucky Irving at length and five of the other most prominent running backs in this class last week, and today I want to discuss the weigh-ins, testing results, and overall Combine implications for a few of the less-heralded runners in the 2024 crop.

Let’s jump right into it with Kimani Vidal, who was boring enough to me prior to last weekend that he ended up in my Guys For Whom Statistical Impact Strikes Me as Unlikely tier in my pre-Combine rankings article. His athletic testing numbers were not boring, however, as he ran 4.46 in the forty and produced 78th-percentile marks in both the jumps and agility drills. In my database of since-2007 draftees and a smattering of undrafted and historical prospects, those numbers – as well as Vidal’s measurements of 5’7 ⅞ and 213 pounds – produces a list of closest physical comps that goes Julius Jones, Jeremy McNichols, Bijan Robinson, Evan Hull, Lamar Miller, D’Andre Swift, Tashard Choice, and Kenneth Dixon. That’s one of the sexiest groups of comps I can imagine (even the busts are my favorite busts!) for a guy who I was fairly uninterested in until he tested, and while I generally don’t want to change my tune much on such a basis, I’m making an exception here.

To be clear, my reservations about Vidal’s failure to truly separate himself from an efficiency standpoint from the collective other backs at Troy still exist, as his career-best marks in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate were the 51st- and 56th-percentile numbers he posted as a senior. The Trojans had some good squads the last couple years, but the thresholds I typically want running backs to hit for their career numbers in those metrics are 120% and 2.5%, which Vidal failed to reach in his best season at a Group of Five program and relative to a mediocre group of backfield teammates. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Still, there are good things to attach your hopes to in Vidal’s profile, and his athleticism just accentuates them. He was productive all four years of his career, he posted nice marks in missed tackles forced per attempt and Chunk Rate+ (so maybe I should have expected good athletic testing results), and he caught 92 passes and graded out well as a pass-protector (according to Pro Football Focus, he’s the second-best in the class in this area). Crazier things have happened than a full-skillset running back with decent-but-not-great efficiency numbers at a mid-major program becoming a jack-of-all-trades role player in the NFL (see: Singletary, Devin). It’s still challenging to explain why Vidal wasn’t more successful in the Sun Belt Conference given how athletic he apparently is, but consistent productivity and athleticism are together enough for me to buy-in on a player who probably won’t cost much to buy-in on. Let “shit happens” be the god of the gaps and giddy up.

Any series of Combine articles is obligated to cover the guy-who-didn’t-do-much-in-college-but-is-suddenly-interesting-because-he-destroyed-athletic-testing, so let’s get our discussion of Isaac Guerendo out of the way. His list of closest athletic comps is basically just a who’s-who of the highest RAS scores of all time, with Justice Hill, Saquon Barkley, Reggie Bush, Jerick McKinnon, Corey Grant rounding out the top-five. If we include height and weight in our calculus, the 6-foot and 221-pound Guerendo comps most closely to the following historical prospects:

Breece Hall, David Johnson, and Marion Barber are exciting names there, but the list of big running backs who run fast forties is filled with just as many duds as studs: Ben Tate was a solid player for a few years, Darius Jackson never did anything, and guys like Master Teague, Chris Henry, Jeremy Cox, Deneric Prince, and Keith Marshall also find themselves near the top of Guerendo’s closest comps. In my mind, these elite testing numbers do make Guerendo more interesting, but they don’t change the direction in which he was interesting beforehand.

By that I simply mean that the guy whose value to an NFL team pre-Combine seemed to be in his special teams prowess and general versatility probably doesn’t suddenly become interesting strictly as a running back by virtue of having run fast and jumped high in Indianapolis. That’s not to say that Guerendo can’t play running back – as I stated in my rankings article, he “[held] his own efficiency-wise” at both Wisconsin and Louisville and I think he can be a solid ground-based contributor in the league – but I still view him as more of a Kene Nwangwu or uber-athletic Brandon Bolden than as the second coming of Willis McGahee. The history of big and fast backs who weren’t remotely productive in college is illustrative of the limits we should still envision for his NFL potential: even among guys in my database who ran sub-4.45 at 215+, there are zero fantasy-relevant players when we limit our search to those whose career-high Dominator Ratings fell below the 20% threshold (the closest we get by fudging the search parameters is either Knile Davis or Antonio Gibson, the first of whom posted a 23.7% DR as a sophomore at Arkansas, and the second of whom played wide receiver in college). Guerendo is still a semi-interesting runner with underrated pass-catching chops and a ton of ancillary value to offer on special teams, but don’t let a gaudy 40-yard dash convince you he’s a better prospect (especially in the context of fantasy football) than he actually is.

Another guy who did well for himself at the Combine is Dylan Laube. At 206 pounds and just under 5’10, the New Hampshire product ran 4.54, cleared 37 inches in the vertical, posted a 96th-percentile Agility Score, and put up the fifth-most bench press reps of any running back at this year’s Combine. Based on those numbers, his ten closest physical comps in my database are Brian Westbrook, Storm Johnson, Ronald Jones, Chase Edmonds, Ronnie Hillman, Brandon Jackson, Bishop Sankey, Duke Johnson, Antonio Pittman, and Evan Hull.

This is a case where a guy’s athletic profile and resulting comps almost completely overlap with the sort of player he is purported to be stylistically: Laube is widely touted as a versatile receiving threat with some early-down bona fides, and – to varying degrees – that’s what Westbrook, Edmonds, Hillman, Jackson, Johnson, and Hull have been. For rookie draft purposes (at least pre-NFL Draft), I’m operating as if Laube is just Hull redux.

Let’s finish up this article by quickly surveying a few more Combine performances that caught my eye: