It would be difficult to concoct a legitimate NFL running back prospect who is more apparently boring than Dillon Johnson is. That’s not to say that he’s necessarily bad – we’ll get to that in a bit – just that he’s tough to get truly excited about, at least based on a quick survey of his general profile.
The most striking section of Johnson’s resumé is the one outlining his receiving contributions, as he caught 24 passes as Washington’s lead back in 2023 after having hauled in a whopping 149 over three seasons at Mississippi State. A closer look, however, reveals perhaps less meat than you’d expect on such a sizable bone. A perusal of the Pass-Catching Primer article I published back in February shows Johnson to be entering the league with sub-standard marks in most ancillary receiving categories: he lined up out wide or in the slot on a 38th-percentile portion of his snaps, his average target traveled a 13th-percentile distance down the field (it actually went 1.4 yards backwards), he ran something other than basic, checkdown-type routes on a 32nd-percentile portion of his total pass patterns, and his overall inventory could boast no more than 17th-percentile Route Diversity over his entire career; his efficiency is even less impressive than his deployment, as he posted marks in the 25th, 7th, and 14th percentiles, respectively, in yards per target, yards per reception, and YAC per reception. In terms of demonstrated ability, Johnson’s voluminous role and 95.1% career catch rate – an 87th-percentile figure – leave little doubt about his capacity to stand over there in the flat and catch a dump-off, but nearly everything else about his receiving profile falls incredibly short not just of the standard set by his sky-high receptions totals, but of the median marks established by the entire population of backs drafted in the last decade or two. We know he can catch an open pass right around the line of scrimmage, but it’s not as if doing that 173 times magically turns you into some kind of receiving weapon, especially given we know a) that Johnson was asked to do nearly no advanced stuff in the passing game, and b) that his receptions hardly constituted efficient contributions.
Perhaps the second-most appealing aspect of Johnson’s analytical profile is his production, but even here we’re knuckles deep trying to scrape something positive out of the peanut butter jar. It’s good that Johnson was a contributing part of Power Five backfields from day one, and his 2023 season with the Huskies – in which he ran for nearly 1200 yards and scored 16 touchdowns for the second-best team in the country – did much to legitimize his workhorse bona fides. Still, it’s not like he was 2015 Ezekiel Elliott out there: accounting for Johnson’s market share numbers as well as Washington’s offensive and overall S&P+ ratings, his fourth-year production is most comparable to those posted by historical runners like Henry Josey (of 2013 Missouri), Rex Burkhead (2012 Nebraska), Shermari Jones (2021 Coastal Carolina), Anthony Wales (2015 Western Kentucky), and Jase McCellan (2023 Alabama). That’s hardly a murderers’ row of smash NFL prospects, and Johnson’s 2023 campaign is probably more accurately described as simply good for a college back than it is as indicative of high-level professional potential.
From an athletic standpoint, Johnson is close to completely uninteresting. He measured in at the Combine at a solid 5’11 ⅝” and 217 pounds, making him close to the platonic ideal (or at least to the recent historical average proportions) of an NFL rusher. His testing was a far cry from the performances put on by similarly-statured backs such as Marshawn Lynch, Bijan Robinson, or Knowshon Moreno, though: Johnson ran 4.68 in the forty-yard dash, covered the final twenty yards of that run in a sluggish 2.00 seconds, and posted sub-30th-percentile marks in both the vertical leap and broad jump. He didn’t participate in any agility drills this offseason, but the whole of his tested athleticism is uninspiring (and the “dillon johnson mph” Twitter search uncovers zero in-game clips indicating a higher level of play speed than what his 40 time would suggest he possesses).
So, with the three pillars of analytical running back evaluation – receiving skills, production, and physical profile – all in agreement about his mediocrity, why do some (Matt Waldman, Bob Henry, and Sam Monson among them) insist that Johnson is a prospect to be taken seriously in this 2024 class? Perhaps it has something to do with the large area of running back play not covered by those three pillars: running the football. Along those lines, let’s examine Johnson’s rushing efficiency profile and film to see if we can’t conjure up some of the same excitement that prompted Waldman to rank him near the top of the positional leaderboard in this year’s group.
Not bad! If we set aside for a moment the trifecta of 30th-percentile marks on the back half of this table (and I think that’s appropriate based on our pre-existing acknowledgment of Johnson’s lackluster athleticism, as creating explosive plays and evading defenders are some of the most athleticism-dependent elements of running back play), Johnson otherwise looks like a guy who produced very solid per-play outcomes in the context of his multiple collegiate offenses.
Because it’s harder to finesse (in both senses of the word) your way to consistent output than it is to finesse your way to inflated averages, I’m a sucker for good Success Rate numbers, something Johnson definitely possesses. His Relative Success Rate indicates he was doing something right on a down-to-down basis throughout his career, as does his raw number from his lone workhorse season in 2023: the Washington runner’s 51.9% Success Rate ranked 14th among 83 Power Five runners with 100+ attempts last season, and it trailed only Tahj Brooks’ 54.0% mark among backs with at least 200 carries (which means Ollie Gordon, Blake Corum, Omarion Hampton, Quinshon Judkins, DJ Giddens, Devin Neal, and a variety of others succeeded on a lower percentage of their rushes in 2023 than Johnson did on his).
His Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating is also a quality number, as Johnson posted an above-baseline mark in the metric in all but his freshman season, and capped off his career with a 1000-yard campaign in which he exceeded the per-carry output of the other backs on his elite offense by 21.9% (and exceeded their rate of successful attempts by 6.5%). The only (exclusively) Power Five back in this class who leaves college with BAE Rating and RSR numbers that are both as good as Johnson’s is Audric Estime. The career marks posted by Corum, Jonathon Brooks, Trey Benson, Bucky Irving, and Will Shipley fall short of Johnson’s in both areas. Here we start to see what Waldman and others find appealing in the Husky runner’s game: he adds value and churns out positive outcomes on the ground.
Let’s now turn to Johnson’s film, of which I have watched and charted four games: the 2023 contests against Arizona, Oregon, Texas, and Michigan in which he went a combined 68-273-5 on the ground (and it’s worth mentioning that the Texas and Michigan games – in addition to being against two of Pro Football Focus’ top-five rated rushing defenses – came after Johnson sustained a broken foot versus Oregon State).
The first conclusion I’d draw from Johnson’s tape is that he is a no-nonsense runner. The rate at which he attempted evasive maneuvers in interactions with defenders in the 68-carry sample I charted is the eighth-lowest among 40 qualifying backs, while the solidness of the contact he absorbed on a per-interaction basis is also an above-average mark. Even when he does try to make defenders miss, Johnson’s methods are somewhat unorthodox: he leans more heavily on what I classify as “hard” maneuvers such as jump cuts and dead legs (as opposed to “fluid” maneuvers like crossover and swim moves), but many of his attempts at evasion are more like a simple changing of direction than they are like an actual juke:
The first play shown in that little compilation is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Johnson changes directions two (and a half?) times in one run, first to bounce himself outside, second to elude a defensive back, and immediately again to orient himself slightly more toward the sideline, and all of them involve more stutter-step gathering than we typically see from running back prospects in those situations. Most of the other moves in the video are similar, as Johnson evades defenders using something that serves the same function as a dead leg but that would more accurately be described as a self-contained shuffle that results in a change of direction. I don’t want to say this stylistic feature of his game is necessarily bad – Johnson actually ranks fifth among backs I’ve charted in the success rate of his attempted evasive maneuvers – but it might be indicative of some more broadly problematic limitations in his athletic tool kit.
That hypothesis jives pretty well with the testing results we got at the Combine, as well as with Johnson’s non-participation in the agility drills (not that I would always assume that guys who don’t participate in drill X are doing so because they know they’ll test poorly in drill X, but a) I think that’s often the case, and b) that would make sense in the context of the other things we know about Johnson’s testing performance and on-field play). These athletic limitations also probably have something to do with his underwhelming missed tackles forced numbers. The per-attempt average of 0.20 that Johnson ends his college career with is not good: it’s just over half of Benson’s career average, it beats the numbers posted by just three backs in the 2024 class (Rasheen Ali, Cody Schrader, and Jaden Shirden), and it’s been a feature of Johnson’s statistical profile since he was a sophomore at Mississippi State (he forced 0.33 missed tackles per attempt on a 51-carry workload as a freshman before never averaging more than 0.21 in any future season). A small sample of successful maneuvers in my charting aside, indications from athletic testing, PFF, and the eye test are all in agreement about Johnson’s relative lack of lateral agility and elusiveness (at the very least and without making qualitative statements about how agile or elusive he might be, I think it’s safe to say that the skills derivative of those traits are are not substantial parts of his on-field repertoire).
Johnson is also a high-effort runner, though his blue collar style doesn’t always combine with his workhorse frame to produce functional power on the field. My charting reveals his through-contact success to be above-average against defensive backs, but below-average against both defensive linemen and linebackers. He’s somewhat similar to Braelon Allen in this regard, as limits on lateral mobility make meaningful manifestations of power rarer when we isolate our scope to the tight spaces near the line of scrimmage than when we look at runway-aided interactions with smaller defenders out in space. This lack of on-field power is also reflected in the yards after contact numbers charted by PFF: the only 200+ carry runners that Johnson gained more YAC per attempt than in 2023 were Blake Corum, Rasheen Ali, Marcus Carroll, and LeQuint Allen, none of whom could match his bellcow build. Johnson’s career mark of 3.07 YAC per attempt would have fallen below the national average in every season since 2017, and in seven of the ten years since PFF started tracking the metric back in 2014.
From a decision-making standpoint, Johnson is pretty sound, especially on zone concepts. His workload in 2023 was pretty evenly split between gap and zone after the Air Raid scheme he operated in at Mississippi State saw him deployed almost exclusively on zone plays (PFF says he had 35 gap runs to 183 zone runs across those three seasons), so his greater expertise in that area is perhaps unsurprising. It’s also pretty clear, though, as Johnson earned positive grades in vision, patience, and decisiveness on his way to producing an overall grade that ranks 11th out of 37 qualifiers.
Johnson’s only above-average grade on gap concepts came in the area of tracking, while his overall grade ranked 32nd among those same 37 runners. Still, his low-ish rate negatively-graded plays and his high-ish rate of neutrally-graded plays combine to illustrate that he wasn’t really causing issues behind the line of scrimmage on gap runs, but rather just not adding much value (at least via his decision-making) beyond what his blockers created for him. When you’re running behind a quality offensive line (PFF rated Washington’s big boys as the country’s 40th-best run-blocking unit) against relatively weak defensive competition in the Pac-12 (a weighted average of the PFF grades of the teams Johnson faced last year indicates that his mean carry came against the nation’s 60th-best rushing defense), such a hands-off approach isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I feel like I don’t have a ton of specific things to say about Johnson as a behind-the-line-of-scrimmage decision-maker, partly because he’s mostly inoffensive in this regard and partly because he doesn’t have – at least that I perceived – many extreme tendencies or notable traits that differentiate him from other backs in a stylistic sense. I once remarked that Damien Harris was the kind of back that the default sliders would generate in create-a-player mode, and I feel similarly about Johnson. He’s boring in the ways we outlined earlier in this article, and he’s also pretty run-of-the-mill in that he lacks many distinguishing features on film. On top of the somewhat strange cutting and evasive style I pointed out above, the one other thing that jumps out to me is a slight tendency to bounce runs to the outside. This wasn’t something that (as far as I can tell) affected Johnson’s output negatively, and it also wasn’t something that I graded him poorly for (because the reads he made were viable on a play-level and in the context of the competition he was facing), but I wouldn’t be shocked if such a tendency needed to be curtailed at the next level given his athletic limitations.
Overall, though, I think Johnson is a fine running back prospect. He’s not at all exciting, but we’ve seen him handle a large workload, perform reasonably well in two vastly different offensive systems, and catch the ball cleanly on a large sample of (admittedly basic) targets. He’s not a big play guy, but I also can’t really argue with his near-spotless track record of positive team-relative efficiency. Like Damian Harris, Johnson just kinda runs the ball well despite not being that impressive in any one area. He’s not a guy I’m planting my flag on in this running back class, but I also wouldn’t rule him out as a rotational runner (or third-down contributor) who can step into a short-term lead role and produce starting-level fantasy numbers. Just because he’s a bland cereal doesn’t mean he can’t be a part of this balanced breakfast.