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.