Currently listed at 6-feet tall and 232 pounds, there’s a decent chance that Damien Martinez ends up as the biggest runner in the 2025 draft class. Historical weight gain patterns currently predict a 229-pound weigh-in from him in that eventual pre-draft cycle, heavier than any back drafted in either 2023 or 2022 and heavier than all but Raheim Sanders among players who currently project as 2025 draftees (and Sanders strikes me as a guy who might stand to benefit from cutting weight).

Being big doesn’t guarantee NFL success, but a) bigger backs simply get more opportunities on average than do smaller backs, and b) substantial size can make a player suitable (or at least appear to scouting departments and coaching staffs as suitable) for niche roles like two-down volume absorption and short-yardage running that can serve as shortcuts to fantasy relevance. From where things stand now, it seems like the 2025 class is going to have a bevy of proven workhorse types, but Martinez has the size and history of production -- he has run for over 2100 yards and scored 16 touchdowns in two seasons as the starting tailback on top-25 Oregon State squads -- to put together a strong candidacy for any NFL team looking to fill such roles next spring. To evaluate how successful he might be in taking advantage of his opportunities and ultimately providing value to fantasy teams, let’s look at Martinez’s rushing efficiency profile through 25 games as a Beaver:

As is becoming a trend with these 2025 runners, Martinez has been good but not great through the lens of box count-adjusted, team-relative efficiency metrics as an underclassman. For him specifically, I think we can view those relatively unimpressive Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating numbers as having been capped by a lack of juice in the open field. His subpar Breakaway Conversion Rate indicates that Martinez is not turning many of his chunk gains into big plays, and he has averaged just 9.0 yards per “open field opportunity” thus far in his career. That is a very low mark:

In 2023, Martinez gained 8.8 yards per open field opportunity, the 89th-”best” average among the 157 nation-wide running backs who have carried the ball 100+ times this season. I think it’s reasonable to mark him down as a guy who simply doesn’t offer much value beyond the second level of the defense (I don’t, however, want to paint the picture that Martinez is some sort of slug at the second level, as we’ve seen him rip off long runs before and shouldn’t be surprised when he does so in the future; all of these strengths and weaknesses simply exist on spectrums, and while he’s not comically incompetent in the open field, Martinez is below-average in that area relative to the running backs who go on to play in the best professional league in the world).

A charitable reading of Martinez’s efficiency profile would regard such a flaw as being fine in the grand scheme of things, and it’s certainly true that running backs do not need to be dynamic open-field runners in order to be effective players on aggregate: Jamaal Williams, Tyler Allgeier, Kyren Williams, Alexander Mattison, and others have been relatively non-explosive prospects in recent years who nonetheless made valuable contributions to NFL running games. Some of Martinez’s ancillary metrics show that he may be capable of such things as well: he breaks a lot of tackles -- in addition to the missed tackles forced numbers, Martinez’s yards after contact per attempt average ranks 25th among that group of 157 100+ carry runners this season, ahead of guys like Ollie Gordon, Braelon Allen, and Devin Neal -- and he has no issue reaching the open field. His impressive career figure in Chunk Rate+ is illustrative of the latter, as is his raw Chunk Rate: Martinez has ripped off ten-yard runs at a 19.2% clip through two seasons, a mark that would rank in the top-five among Power Five backs in 2023.

It’s worth pointing out that Martinez’s raw numbers have been aided by some excellent offensive line play, as the Beavers’ big boys have ranked sixth and second, respectively, in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grade among all FBS teams in the last two years. They’ve been completely dominant, to the point that the non-Martinez runners at Oregon State have averaged 5.14 yards per carry and succeeded on 49% of their 359 attempts during his tenure, numbers that are both better than what Blake Corum has posted behind the country’s 20th-best run-blocking unit in 2023.

Such a situational boost is exactly the sort of thing that box count-adjusted and team-relative efficiency metrics are designed to correct for, and Martinez’s elite raw Success Rate marks -- he has ranked 14th and 8th, respectively, out of more than 80 high-volume Power Five runners in each of the last two years -- perhaps misrepresent the amount of credit that he deserves for churning out a steady flow of positive outcomes for the Beaver offense. Relative Success Rate indicates that he is succeeding on his attempts at a higher rate than are the other backs on the team, but not by much. In 2022, Martinez’s RSR was actually -0.6%, and it jumped up to a respectable-but-still-historically-unimpressive 2.9% in 2023 (a mark that lands in the 54th percentile among recent draftees).

That improvement is the silver lining to these ho-hum metrics. Martinez’s BAE Rating also increased in 2023, from 111.2% in his freshman year to 118.9% this season, and similar progression in what could be his final season in 2024 would make me much more confident in his professional prospects than I currently am. As of now, he’s a big fish in a small pond over in Corvallis, playing well relative to fairly average teammates at a mostly nondescript Power Five program (though as I pointed out earlier, the Beavers have put together some good seasons with Martinez in the backfield), making him fairly unremarkable -- in terms of on-field results -- in the context of the sorts of hopeful running back draftees we see on a yearly basis. His lack of anything resembling a receiving skill-set -- he has hauled in just 15 passes on an abysmal 50.0% Catch Rate so far in his career -- also currently holds him back. As things stand today, I view Martinez as a day-three prospect whose most likely path to fantasy relevance is as an effort-fueled grinder in the Jamaal Williams mold. If he fails to reach those heights, the career paths of Royce Freeman, Kevin Harris, or Vick Ballard are not out of the realm of possibility.