I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about and sharing my thoughts on Devon Achane already this offseason, particularly in a two-part article (that you can find here and here) in which I offered examples from Achane’s film to support the idea that he may be more suited for a legitimate, three-down workload in the NFL than his 5’9 and 185-pound frame would suggest. However, subjective film evaluations can only give me so much confidence -- I need quantified on-field results before I am able to fully hop on board with any player, as even when the film is great, the profiles lacking such data-based legitimization often turn out to be landmines (see: Isaiah Spiller).
That legitimization is particularly important for a guy like Achane, where the needle is more difficult to thread on his professional prospects given the disadvantage that his size puts him at. Indeed, we’ve seen many speedy, sub-205-pound backs (let alone sub-190!) come down the pike in recent years, with hardly any of them even coming close to duplicating their collegiate success at the next level: Pierre Strong, Ty Chandler, Justice Hill, Darrynton Evans, Tyler Goodson, Tyler Badie, and more all entered the league at no more than 204 pounds while running 4.45 or faster in the forty-yard dash at the Combine after having put together seasons in college as 1000-yard rushing workhorses on top of proven ability as dynamic satellite backs. The best any of them have to show for those credentials (to be fair, so far) is the 262-scrimmage yard season that Badie put up in 2022, with Strong’s 90 yards and a touchdown against Arizona in week 14 of last year standing alone as their collective single-game magnum opus.
That’s not to say that I expect the same things from Achane in the NFL, but simply to delineate the struggles that small backs have in transitioning to the league, even when they are quality pass-catchers with top-tier athleticism. If we are to trust that Achane can buck that trend, we need pudding in which to find proof. To that end, chew on these career numbers from the Texas A&M product in question:
Given his near-world class speed, it should come as no surprise that Achane was an explosive collegiate performer who routinely ripped off chunk gains and then extended those chunk gains deeper into the secondary at a high rate. That big-play ability often carries over to the NFL, and of the 14 historical draftees who also posted career marks in the top tertile in both Chunk Rate+ and Breakaway Conversion Rate while playing in Power 5 conferences, three of them were selected in the first round of the NFL Draft (Travis Etienne, David Wilson, and Sony Michel), seven of them were selected by the third round of the NFL Draft (Etienne, Wilson, Michel, Kenneth Walker, James Cook, Joe Mixon, Eddie Lacy, and Duke Johnson), and seven of them put up at least one season of 1000+ scrimmage yards during the span of their rookie contract (Etienne, Walker, Mixon, Michel, Lacy, Johnson, and Rhamondre Stevenson).
That’s all good, but we already know that Achane is a big-play guy (for the uninitiated: 1, 2, 3), and that’s not where the questions about his game lie. I addressed concerns about his size, strength, and power in those previously published articles, but the PFF-charted missed tackles forced numbers also say good things about Achane’s ability to shake off would-be tacklers: he broke away from defenders at nearly the same rate (0.28 per attempt to 0.29) as 224-pound tackle-breaker extraordinaire Tyler Allgeier did during his college career, and more often than did other bigger backs like Breece Hall, Dameon Pierce, Zach Charbonnet, and Zach Evans (0.27, 0.25, 0.27, and 0.26, respectively).
Another important number on the above table is Achane’s positive mark in Box Count+. It’s one thing for a small, speedy player to run efficiently relative to his teammates when he’s coming into the game on third-and-long and taking draws up the middle for 8 yards a pop, or when he’s lined up in the slot and sent in motion to catch the defense sleeping on a jet sweep, but Achane did not depend on that kind of usage to be effective at A&M. During no season of his career were the defensive fronts he was carrying the ball against lighter than those faced by other Aggie runners, and he was still able to average more than a full yard per carry greater than his backfield mates over the course of his career. As a true freshman in 2020 (and with jet sweeps and other gadgety rush attempts completely removed from the sample, as is the case with all the team-relative metrics I use), Achane averaged 2.98 yards per carry greater than the All-SEC Spiller and the collective other backs on the team (a 98th-percentile mark), all while running into box counts that were 0.42 defenders heavier than what those other guys faced (a discrepancy in the 99th percentile).
Devon Achane smashed the efficiency of his college teammates despite sharing a backfield with the mega-talented Isaiah Spiller.
The next key number in Achane’s profile is his 7.0% mark in Relative Success Rate. The 11.0% figure that Achane posted in that area in 2021 was the highest among all SEC running backs with at least 100 carries, and his career number is third-highest among all backs to be drafted after playing with college backfield mates that averaged at least a 3.50-star rating as high school recruits (3.50 is right around the 66th percentile for teammates of eventual draftees; Achane’s teammates collectively averaged 3.95 stars, an 83rd-percentile rating). In other words, of the guys who played in college backfields made up primarily of 4- and 5-star talents, only Tyrion Davis-Price and Dameon Pierce have exceeded the chain-moving output of their stud teammates at a more impressive rate than Achane did at A&M.
Achane also enters the league with a higher career mark in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating than any other guy who played with 3.50-star teammates in college, and it’s not particularly close: his 145.6% dwarfs Clyde Edwards-Helaire’s second-place 132.9%. When Achane gets drafted later this spring, he’ll be the only running back with even 3.00-star college teammates to enter the league with a BAE Rating above the 140% threshold. The degree to which he smashed the efficiency of the other guys in College Station isn’t just good, it’s ridiculous.
Because of all this -- the big-play ability, the tackle-breaking skill, the dominant, down-in and down-out efficiency as a ball-carrier in spite of defenses packing the box to stop him -- I view Achane as the best pure runner in this year’s crop of backs, size be damned, a distinction that the Badies, Goodsons, Evanses, and Chandlers of the world couldn't come close to in their respective classes (and you can give however much credit to Strong for running efficiently in the Missouri Valley Conference that you want): Chandler finished his college career with three straight seasons with negative marks in Relative Success Rate, Evans averaged just 0.13 yards per carry (in the 32nd percentile) greater than teammates who averaged lower than a 2-star rating as recruits, Goodson finished his time at Iowa with a sub-100% BAE Rating and a negative RSR, and Badie’s crowning achievement is the 107.1% mark (23rd) he posted relative to 1.70-star teammates as a senior at Missouri. No, the historical prospects who Achane should be compared to are the ones for whom comparison borders on blasphemy: Chris Johnson and Jamaal Charles, or for the timid among you, CJ Spiller, Jahvid Best, and Steve Slaton.
We’ll find out what Achane measures in at in a few days, but whether he’s closer to 5’10 and 180 pounds or the 5’8 ⅝” and 194 pounds that I project, the above group of players is the archetype that he belongs to:
He’s perhaps a bit lighter than they were, but as a far shorter guy than the 5’11 Charles and Johnson, Achane may have a very similar proportional build to what these other guys came into the league with. Outside of that, he was just as productive as they were, just as prolific a pass-catcher as they were, similarly efficient on the ground, and it will be the shock of the century if Achane’s 40-yard dash time is closer to Slaton’s than Best’s.
The bottom line is that it seems unlikely to me that the last small, skinny, super fast running back to ever dominate the NFL has already completed his career, and if I’m right, the next guy in that mold will probably look something like the elite talents who came before him. We could search for the next decade and not find a player who fits that description better than Devon Achane does.