I’ve received some requests via Twitter to put together some sort of rankings mash-up incorporating running backs from the last few draft classes, presumably as a way to frame, illustrate, or think through the overall quality of the 2024 class and some of the individual players in it. I am nothing if not a man of the people, so that’s what I’m here to do today: smash the 2024, 2023, and 2022 running back classes together and let the chips fall where they may.

Before we jump into it, I want to quickly outline the parameters of this exercise and describe the ways in which it’s not completely straightforward. First, because my evaluations of players are fluid (inasmuch as they change with new information from athletic testing, increased film study, or just further thought), you can probably point to some version of (for example) my 2023 rookie running back rankings that doesn’t exactly reflect the ordering and tiering of those players done in this article. I don’t see that as a huge issue, and for our purposes here, I’ve decided to use my final, pre-Draft rankings for each of the last two classes, as well as the most recent version of my rankings for the current class. That said, this exercise is made somewhat difficult due to the fact that I’ve learned things and changed my evaluative processes and philosophies to various extents in the last couple of years. This won’t be a helpful article if I simply look at how the 2022 running back class shook out in the NFL and retroactively change my evaluations to fit their professional outcomes, but it also won’t be a helpful article if I copy the mistakes I made back in 2022 and paste them into these combined tiers.

As an example: I talked a bit in my appearance on the Dynasty Points podcast about resolving to focus more on the seemingly-ancillary things that running backs need to do well in order to a) dress down on gameday, and b) actually get on the field. Some of my biggest “misses” in recent years have been with players who I identified as good runners but who later failed to receive much or any on-field opportunity, seemingly due to their inability to fulfill prerequisites like contributing on special teams, pass-protecting, or holding onto the football. Can we really say that – given their lack of NFL production – guys like Tiyon Evans, Zach Evans, Kevin Harris, and DeWayne McBride simply can’t run the ball as well as I thought they could as prospects, or is it more (or even as) likely that they are good runners who just haven’t earned their way into carrying the ball by filling some other gameday niche?

Whether I was actually right or wrong about Evans’ or Harris’ pure rushing ability is not really the point. What’s important is that this article serve its purpose in framing the 2024 running back class against those of the last couple years, and I think the best way to do that is by pretending as if I was evaluating all of these guys today, not with the benefit of the information gained from McBride’s or Keaontay Ingram’s uneventful NFL careers, but through my current philosophical lens (which, as I illustrated above, is different now than it was in 2022). I’m not going to act like my estimation of Tiyon Evans’ ability was different than it actually was (and to prove it, here’s an article I wrote about him last February), but I am going to rank and tier him in this exercise as if I had evaluated him with the benefit of the lessons I’ve learned over the last couple years.

I want to clarify two final things before we start. First, I had not yet incorporated film study into my process as of 2022, so – as it’s impossible for me to go back and scout those guys with that added element in any results-blind way (and I wouldn’t have the time to do so even if there was) – I’ll simply be using the data-derived insights for those players that I was using at the time. Second – and this is one of the more important caveats guiding this whole exercise – these evaluations (and the way in which they are tiered relative to each other) are done without much consideration given to fantasy football. It probably makes sense to think of this mash-up as the order in which I’d prefer running backs in the last three drafts if I were the general manager of an NFL team looking to select players for real-life purposes. In other words, this article will reflect how good I think the relevant players are “in a vacuum”, not how many fantasy points I think they might score in the NFL (though there’s obviously significant overlap between those two considerations).

That’s (more than) enough of a preamble, so let’s get right to it, starting with the guys who I would be excited about deploying as my do-everything RB1, and who I’d expect to develop into elite bellcows during their rookie contracts:

Nobody in the 2024 class fits this description. A couple players in the next few tiers are in the ballpark, but in a much more speculative way.

This next tier is made up of backs who aren’t traditional three-down players but have a skillset that I consider elite in at least one area. They would rarely come off the field and would be deployed as a specializing centerpiece of my offense:

Again, no 2024 guys.

The following tier is a big one, populated by guys possessing good-but-not-quite-elite talent, and who either supplement JAGy traits with a particular speciality or who have jack-of-all-trades appeal in several areas. I would be optimistic about any of these guys as my potential RB1, and would be thrilled to have them as members of a split or committee backfield:

When I talk about the 2024 running back class being underrated, this is what I mean. While there are no Breece Hall-type box-checkers or Jahmyr Gibbs-level specialists in this year’s group, there is a wealth of very solid prospects who stand up well to the second-tier of runners found in the last couple classes. All of them have their warts – Benson is known to miss a hole or two, Brooks lacks some power and is coming off an ACL tear, Corum isn’t a prototypical size/speed specimen and has dealt with a serious knee injury of his own, Estime is kinda slow, and Lloyd has some ball-security issues – but so did the past prospects listed alongside them. Walker had a terrible receiving profile, Pierce was a huge projection given his small collegiate role, White was not a nuanced between-the-tackles runner, and Charbonnet had some sloppy tendencies at the line of scrimmage. All four of those backs, however, have achieved (varying levels of) success in converting their strengths to NFL productivity, and I expect the same of this tier of 2024 runners. It’s also worth pointing out that I’m listing these players in alphabetical order within their yearly groupings (for my differentiated 2024 rankings, see here).

Next is a somewhat varied group of three-down players who I’d speculatively consider as something more than JAGs, as well as guys with actively good talent that is slightly more confined to specialized niches. I’d be excited about the potential of any of these players to grow into a key member of a committee or – on the high-end – even into a quality starter:

Davis is almost a cross between Ingram and Spears in the sort of role I envision for him in the NFL, while Shipley is pretty similar to Spears in that regard.

This next tier is much like the one above it, but with less certainty surrounding the three-down utility of its speculative non-JAGs and more certainty surrounding the limitations of it’s niche specialists:

This is another area where the 2024 class shines, as it offers a ton of probable role players who can do a variety of things competently or one thing really well. For whatever it’s worth, I had a hard time deciding whether to put Braelon Allen and Jaylen Wright into this tier or the one above it, and I’m certainly not married to these placements as I think more about the relevant players leading up to the Draft (I could also be convinced that Bucky Irving or Dylan Laube deserve to be grouped with Ray Davis and Will Shipley).

Finally (because I’m not going to touch on literally every player in each of the last three draft classes in this article), we have a tier of guys who seem like good two-down backs but may have a hard time getting on the field if it turns out that they don’t offer much value elsewhere:

There are guys in the last few classes who I didn’t include anywhere in these tiers, mostly because I did a bad job of evaluating them (or at least didn’t put enough stock into their strengths versus their perceived weaknesses) and was too low on their potential as a result. Among them are Kyren Williams, Isiah Pacheco, Jaylen Warren, Jerome Ford, and Brian Robinson, all of whom are – perhaps unsurprisingly – from the 2022 offseason during which I had not yet started watching film. If I attempted to place them into these tiers based on how I think I would evaluate them if they were current prospects, they’d probably mostly end up in the Braelon Allen tier.

As a final comment, I’ll point out that there are some potentially exciting prospects in the current class that I did not mention here. That’s partly because attempting to rank 2023’s RB21 versus 2024’s RB18 doesn’t provide enough juice to be worth the squeeze, but also because I haven’t completed my evaluations for this class yet. Keep an eye out for articles on guys like Tyrone Tracy and Rasheen Ali in the coming weeks.