I didn’t know anything about Deneric Prince before the Combine. I knew he played at Tulsa and I’ve seen his name pop up in spreadsheets and I maybe could have recollected that Texas A&M is where he spent his true freshman season, but before he ran that 4.41 at 216 pounds, I couldn’t have told you how big he was, how fast he was, how impressive his production was, how efficient he was on the ground, or how involved he was as a receiver. Nothing about his profile put him on my radar prior to Combine invites going out, and I never got around to doing work on him in the lead-up to the Combine actually happening, so in my mind, Prince was a random, small school running back without any standout elements to his profile begging further exploration. That is no longer the case:

Now, I know that Prince has near-elite long speed, and not just according to his impressive forty time, but additionally to his even more impressive Flying 20. Using the (still unofficial as of the time of this writing) 20-yard splits at ras.football, we can calculate how long it takes a player to complete the final 20 yards of his 40-yard dash. In my opinion, that time is more reflective of a player’s actual top speed than his full 40-time is, given that it ignores the technique-dependent start that can massively impact the aggregate time.

While Prince’s start to the dash wasn’t bad by any measure, only 14 backs have been drafted since 2007 after posting faster Flying 20s than what he put up during his run this weekend, and nearly a third of those guys have 1000-scrimmage yard seasons on their NFL resumés (it’d be more than a third if you fudge the threshold for Isiah Pacheco’s 960-yard rookie season, an adjustment that would see him join Chris Johnson, Darren McFadden, Knowshon Moreno, and Kenyan Drake). Among ten historical prospects with Flying 20s equivalent to Prince’s are Latavius Murray, Adrian Peterson, Steve Slaton, and Antonio Gibson.

Basically, Prince is fast, and his quality performance in the jumps means he also has some zero-inertia explosiveness. We don’t know what his agility numbers look like (it seems as if Evan Hull and SaRodorick Thompson were the only running backs to participate in agility drills at this year’s Combine), but among historical players who participated in the forty-yard dash and at least one jumping drill during their respective pre-Draft processes, Prince’s five closest athletic comps in my database are Chris Thompson, Jonathan Taylor, Lamar Miller, Pierre Strong, and Nyheim Hines. That group is made up almost entirely of legitimate NFL contributors, two of whom are speedy, sub-200-pound scat backs, while the two others are multiple-time 1000-yard rushers and some of the best size-adjusted athletes we’ve seen at the position in recent history.

Lamar Miller is both one of Deneric Prince’s closest athletic comps and one of only four players in NFL history with multiple 90+ yard rushing touchdowns in his career.

Backs who move like Prince are often good NFL players, and that’s especially true in the context of his size: his ten closest physical comps (taking size into account in addition to athleticism) in my database (and without skipping any names) are Marshawn Lynch, Joseph Addai, Bijan Robinson, Marlon Mack, Knowshon Moreno, Lamar Miller, Bishop Sankey, Adrian Peterson, DeMarco Murray, and Cadillac Williams. That’s a staggeringly good list which includes a guy widely considered a generational prospect in Bijan Robinson, one bust in Bishop Sankey, and eight guys who’ve all rushed for 1000 yards in an NFL season, with the average among them being 2.7 such seasons.

Almost overwhelmingly, players with Prince’s physical skill-set succeed as pros. Another thing those successful guys do is run efficiently in college. The average college YPC+ figure for that last group of comps (excluding Bijan, though his mark is 0.68) is 0.84, a 63rd-percentile mark, but with Sankey, Murray, and Williams the only three with marks actually below the 64th percentile. In other words, the best players in that group pretty much all posted upper-tier per-carry numbers relative to what their teammates were contributing. If Prince did too, his case as a legitimate contender in the meat of this class gets interesting:

These numbers don’t look like anything special at first blush, and they’re made a bit strange by the fact that Prince never really operated as the undisputed lead runner in any of his college backfields. He redshirted his first season at Texas A&M before spending another year sitting after transferring to Tulsa, and then played behind a fifth-year senior getting his first shot at an RB1 chair during his first legitimate action in 2020. Then he fell behind another fifth-year senior after starting the first few games before getting hurt in 2021, and last season he led the team in carries with fewer than the next two guys in the pecking order had combined.

In those three years at Tulsa, though, Prince outdid the per-carry efficiency of his backfield mates in all but his injury-riddled 2021 campaign, and his final season was legitimately good:

Those numbers were posted relative to backfields that collectively averaged a 2.77-star rating as high school recruits, a 30th-percentile mark among teammates of backs drafted since 2007.

We could say that Prince ran like a quality NFL prospect for just one season of his five-year college career and then write him off, but I think the context of this particular running back class offers us an alternate perspective. I haven’t studied Prince’s film yet, but his numbers paint the picture of an explosive straight-line runner with big-play ability, and Israel Abanikanda is currently getting widespread sleeper buzz because of his perceived upside as a member of that same archetype. Abanikanda is a third-year player who posted higher career marks in YPC+ and BAE Rating while playing with slightly more highly-touted teammates, but Prince has things in his profile that Izzy can’t match as well. His Relative Success Rate mark suggests he may be a more reliable runner on a play-to-play basis (Abanikanda’s career RSR mark is in the 27th percentile), and on top of having actual proof of the sort of explosive athleticism that Abanikanda is only assumed to have, Prince converted more than 10% more of his career chunk gains into breakaway runs than Abanikanda did (Abanikanda’s career mark in BCR is in the 41st percentile). If Izzy is a house call waiting to happen, what does that make Prince?

Israel Abanikanda falls into a similar stylistic bucket as does Deneric Prince.

The most likely outcome here is that Prince, a workout warrior and solid college football player, just isn’t quite good enough to make much noise in the NFL. However, given the hit rates for guys with his physical tools in addition to the narratives you can tell yourself about Prince’s lack of legitimate opportunity at Tulsa and the degree to which he was affected by injuries in 2021, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a world in which Prince is a diamond in the rough who just had a college career that external factors kept from ever really getting off the ground.

That second story is one that makes sense to latch onto as you’re mining for upside in the late rounds of your rookie drafts, but while I’m not sure where consensus will end up settling on Prince in this running back class, I don’t believe you should let athleticism be the tail that wags the dog of this particular prospect profile. Be intrigued, but be cautious. Abanikanda is a good anchor point.