Deuce Vaughn is very small. At 5’5, he will join Michael Clemons, Howard Stevens, and Mack Herron (taken in the 8th round in 1987, the 16th in 1973, and the 6th in 1970, respectively) as the shortest running backs ever selected in the NFL Draft and the second-shortest running backs to ever carry the ball in an NFL game (or at least since 1946, as far back as measurables are semi-reliably kept for historical players over at pro-football-reference.com), taller than only the 5’4 Buddy Young, who entered the league as a member of the 1950 New York Yanks when the All-America Football Conference (the league whose 1947 draft Young was selected in) merged with the NFL. At 179 pounds, he weighs the same as did post-War runners like Vitamin Smith, Chet Mutryn, and Dick James, and will be the third-lightest running back drafted since at least 2007, heavier than only the 176-pound Donnel Pumphrey and the 174-pound Khalfani Muhammad.

Whether or not it literally makes him a worse football player, that lack of size will likely have a large bearing on the kind of NFL career that Vaughn is able to put together. We know that heavier running backs get more work in the NFL, on average, than do smaller backs, and that effect naturally gets more severe the lighter you go. Warrick Dunn is listed at 187 pounds on Wikipedia, but if you go by the 176 pounds he’s listed at on nflcombineresults.com or by the 180 pounds he’s listed at on pro-football-reference.com, then Dunn is the only running back who weighs 180-or-fewer pounds to carry the ball even 120 times in an NFL season since James Brooks did it for the last of his seven total times in 1991 (Dunn did it in every season of his 12-year career).

A lack of heavy work on the ground makes sense, and conversely you’d think that super small backs would have an easier time producing as pass-catchers in the modern NFL, but if you count hybrid receiver-runner Dexter McCluster, Dunn is still just one of three sub-180-pound backs (along with Tarik Cohen) to catch 50 passes in a single season since Glyn Milburn did it in 1994 (Dunn did it three times). It’s easy to say, “Vaughn will be fine because we just need him to catch passes anyway,” but the reality is that just catching passes (at least to a degree that would make us care in fantasy football) is still something that an average of only one back per decade has done at Vaughn’s size in the last thirty years.

Former Florida State Seminole Warrick Dunn is one of the few super small running backs in recent decades to produce at a high level in the NFL.

Given that strong historical precedent, simply being a good player probably won’t be enough to buck the trend. Pooka Williams is one of the best tackle-breakers and most electric open-field runners we’ve seen in recent college football history (in addition to this ridiculous highlight tape, his missed tackles forced per attempt mark lands in the 98th percentile and his Chunk Rate+ and Breakaway Conversion Rate marks both come in above the 74th percentiles, all better than Vaughn’s career marks in the same metrics), and even with 91st-percentile per-game receiving volume as an amateur to pair with near-elite top speed (his 1.83-second Flying 20 time is in the 89th percentile), the 170-pound Williams has never been on the field for an offensive snap in a regular season NFL game. Donnel Pumphrey ran 4.48 at 176 pounds after keeping future first-round pick Rashaad Penny on the bench and averaging 15.3 yards per reception on 99 career catches (marks in the 96th and 75th percentiles, respectively) at San Diego State, and he never took even a special teams snap in a regular season NFL game after being selected ahead of Aaron Jones, Marlon Mack, and Chris Carson in the fourth round of the 2017 Draft.

Basically, the threshold for even getting on the field as a severely undersized running back is very high, even for guys who earn respectable Draft capital. In order to meet that threshold, Vaughn will need to be significantly more impressive to NFL evaluators and coaches than were talented players like Pooka, Pumphrey, and others. If that’s going to be the case, it will likely be by virtue of his abilities as a receiver, of which his elite production profile is the most obvious piece of evidence:

Among guys who actually played running back in college (so excluding positional converts like Ty Montgomery and hybrid players like Jaylen Samuels), the only back drafted since 2007 who hauled in more of his team’s pass attempts during a single season than what Vaughn earned of the Kansas State passing attack in 2021 is Jacquizz Rodgers, another short king (5’5 ⅞) who vacuumed up 22% of Oregon State’s pass attempts during a 78-reception sophomore campaign in 2009. Rodgers ended his college career with 151 receptions in just 36 games, making him the only player in my database who beats Vaughn’s marks in each of the above three metrics.

Volume statistics aren’t always the most revelatory of true ability or potential for production, however, and while Rodgers was a solid professional receiving back -- he posted totals of 53 and 52 receptions, respectively, in his high-water 2012 and 2013 seasons -- he was never a true difference maker, a fate perhaps portended by a 12th-percentile mark of just 7.0 yards per reception for his college career.

Rodgers was able to leverage a much more robust rushing profile -- compared to Vaughn, he entered the league 17 pounds heavier, averaged 4.3 more carries per game, handled 137 more carries total, and posted a greater mark in career YPC+ -- into an eight-year pro career that saw him eclipse the 90-carry threshold in three different seasons, and it’s likely that Vaughn won’t get on the field in the NFL if his receiving skills amount to securely hauling in inefficient dump-offs. On top of raw volume, it’s important that he brings some proof of dynamism to the table, and his per-target and per-reception efficiency numbers serve to satisfy some of that requirement:

That Catch Rate figure should jump out to you, but it’s more misleading than it is an actual representation of poor hands, as Vaughn’s True Catch Rate (which considers only the targets that Sports Info Solutions deemed “catchable”) is an 88.5% that matches the career mark for Jahmyr Gibbs -- so unless you’re worried about Gibbs having an issue catching the football, you also shouldn’t be concerned about Vaughn in that area.

Part of the blame for that low raw Catch Rate is the advanced and varied usage that Vaughn enjoyed at Kansas State (as passes thrown downfield to players matched up with coverage players on the line of scrimmage are harder to catch than those thrown to players standing alone in the backfield), and that same effect probably had something to do with his relatively low YAC per reception averages. If you catch the ball alone in the backfield, you have a lot more room to gain yards after the catch than you would if you had caught the ball beyond the line of scrimmage with a coverage linebacker or nickel corner already closing in on you at the catchpoint. Indeed, the average YAC per reception mark for backs drafted since 2007 is higher among those with sub-50th-percentile aDOTs (average depth of target) than it is for those with above-average aDOTs (10.1 to 9.1).

Either way, Vaughn’s overall efficiency marks are quite good in spite of usage that artificially deflates some of the ancillary numbers, and, perhaps ironically, it’s that usage that speaks most convincingly to his potential as a high-end receiving weapon out of an NFL backfield:

The above is truly special stuff. To me, the clearest analytical proof of top-shelf receiving skills is versatility, and each number on that table represents another layer of Vaughn’s nearly unmatched versatility as a pass-catcher out of the backfield. For one, he actually lines up in the backfield at low rates relative to how most historical running back prospects were used in college, and while his aDOT is “just” in the 94th-percentile, it’s actually the third-highest mark in my entire database among guys who solely played running back in college (again excluding the converts and hybrids), behind only Pumphrey and Cohen.

The rest of these numbers are calculated using routes run data from Sports Info Solutions, and are an excellent look into the ways that Vaughn is able to attack defenses in the passing game. While the average for FBS runners is 64.1%, during no season of his college career did basic route types (screens, flat routes, swing passes, etc.) make up even half of Vaughn’s total route inventory. The presence of so many advanced route types meant that Vaughn’s overall Route Diversity never dipped below the 97th percentile, and the 4.58 mark he posted in that area as a true freshman in 2020 represents the 22nd-most diverse route tree (lower is better for Route Diversity) for any college runner in the last five years, and the single most diverse among guys who ran at least 50 routes and lined up in the backfield on at least half of their targeted routes. In other words, if you remove low-volume players and those whose deployment precludes them from being considered “traditional” running backs, Vaughn is the most versatile receiver to come out of college at his position in the last half-decade. The numbers indicate that that’s something that matters for both fantasy football and plain old production:

On top of boasting a varied and advanced route-running repertoire, Vaughn displayed an ability to command targets at a high rate on many of the most skill-dependent assignments in the running back route tree. His marks in RATE and Advanced RATE indicate that he was earning opportunities far more frequently on a per-route basis across the board than the majority of college backs do, but the types of routes that he is especially dangerous on should be encouraging for his future as a pro:

On their eleven most-heavily utilized pass patterns, NFL running backs collectively average 1.34 yards per route run. Of those eleven routes, five carry higher individual YPRR marks than the sample mean (in other words, there are five route types that can be considered “high-value” given their relative YPRR values): screens, angles, wheels, drags, and slants. As the above table indicates, Vaughn’s unique skill-set enabled him to run three of those five high-value route types far more often than the average college running back does in every season of his career.

Vaughn was also targeted on most of those high-value route types significantly more frequently than the average college running back is: compared to nationwide per-route target rates of 17.9%, 32.3%, 20.7%, and 27.7%, respectively, Vaughn earned targets on 30.4% of his career out routes, 31.1% of his career angle routes, 26.9% of his career wheel routes, and 45.0% of his career slants. Out of a possible total of 33 (three seasons’ worth of running each of the eleven most-heavily utilized route types), Vaughn earned targets at an above-average rate on 25 single-route performances during his career, and did the same on each of those eleven main route types during at least one of his three college seasons.

Basically what I’m getting is that the analytical profile absolutely matches the reputation that Vaughn’s production and film have given him as one of the best receiving backs we’ve seen come out of college in recent history. He caught more passes than almost anyone else, he was responsible for a larger share of his team’s overall aerial attack than almost anyone else, his versatility enabled deployment rarer and more varied than that of almost anyone else, and he commanded more targets on a per-route basis than almost anyone else, whether you account for the high degree of difficulty of the pass patterns he specialized in or not.

All the numbers point to Vaughn having a special skill-set, particularly in an area where some other dynamic-but-undersized backs in the past have not been special. The aforementioned Pooka Williams posted upper-percentile volume numbers as a receiver in his freshman season at Kansas, but he only eclipsed even the 32nd percentiles in Route Diversity and RATE once each across his three-year college career, and not in the same season.

Deuce Vaughn is our best hope to buck the trend of dynamic-but-small runners like Pooka Williams failing to secure legitimate roles in the NFL.

I wasn’t scouting prospects when the likes of Donnel Pumphrey, Trenton Cannon, or Garrett Wolfe were coming into the league, but I think there are reasons to believe that Deuce Vaughn can experience fantasy-relevant NFL success where those guys fell short. We’ll explore his ability as a ball-carrier in the future, and he’s certainly not a sure thing, but at a bare minimum, the hype for Vaughn’s receiving potential is very justified and I would not be shocked to see him become a starting-level asset as this decade’s version of Tarik Cohen.