Poke around the various devy websites and publications out there (or even just scroll through Twitter) and you’ll notice something interesting: Donovan Edwards, Michigan’s number-two running back, is consistently ranked ahead of Blake Corum, Michigan’s number-one running back and a consensus first-team All-American from last season. The reasons cited for this preference are generally centered around Edwards’ more expansive three-down skillset, and while Corum’s underrated pass-catching chops deserve their own attention, I wouldn’t argue against the idea that Edwards is one of the more dynamic and versatile backfield receivers currently in college.

Last season, Edwards caught 18 passes on a 9.6% Target Share -- a mark in the 59th percentile among historical prospects -- while splitting playing time with a 1400-yard rusher, and he currently boasts career to-date numbers in yards per reception and yards per target that rank in the 82nd and 81st percentiles, respectively, among the same group. The best evidence of his versatility, though, is the way in which he came by his receiving production: he’s lined up out wide or in the slot on nearly a quarter of his career passing snaps, his route tree contained 93rd-percentile Diversity last season (and he was in the 79th percentile in the same area as a freshman), and he’s been targeted an average of 6.3 yards downfield so far in his career, a mark bested only by a smattering of RB/WR hybrid players (Antonio Gibson, Lynn Bowden, CJ Prosise, etc.) among recent NFL prospects.

With the sort of varied deployment that a player like Edwards allows for, he can be an important part of a pro offense even without filling up the box score. In order to be a valuable part of fantasy football rosters, however, he needs to contribute something other than matchup problems for defenses, which basically means he needs to be able to run the ball competently enough to earn decent volume on the ground. One relevant point in his favor is the fact that he averaged 7.1 yards per carry in 2022, and another is the success he experienced in the three-game stretch that Corum missed with injury to close out last season, when Edwards ran for a combined 520 yards on 70 carries against Ohio State, Purdue, and TCU. Still, as the anti-Corum crowd can attest to, simply putting up big rushing numbers behind a dominant Michigan offensive line (they ranked inside the top 25 teams in the country according to both Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grades and Football Outsiders’ Line Yards metric) isn’t sufficient evidence of professional-level ball-carrying abilities, so we’re going to dive a little deeper.

The first step in that direction is a look at Edwards’ rushing efficiency data:

Averaging more than a yard per carry greater than a group of 3.4-star teammates (a weighted recruiting rating that lands in the 60th percentile among teammates of backs drafted since 2007) that includes a legitimate Heisman candidate in Corum is nothing to sneeze at, but it kinda seems like Edwards has earned that mark fueled mostly by incredible efficiency in the open field. A Breakaway Conversion Rate above the 50% threshold is almost unheard of (only four guys since 2010 have been drafted with marks at least that high), but it’s not necessarily a good thing to have that be your meal-ticket trait as a runner, and Edwards’ performance in these other metrics indicates that he’s not creating chunk gains or producing positive outcomes on his carries at rates that are impressive relative to his Wolverine teammates or to historical prospects. When we account for the fact that the defensive fronts he’s run the ball against have been very light in relation to what other Michigan runners have faced in the last two seasons (his -0.15 Box Count+ mark is in the 17th percentile), even his overall per-carry output doesn’t look great: a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 112.4% is good for a college runner, but it’s right in the range of where recent draftees like Cam’Ron Harris, Ty Chandler, Jerrion Ealy, and Tyrion Davis-Price finished up at the end of their amateur careers.

Still, the confounding element in all this team-relative efficiency analysis is that Edwards’ per-carry output is largely being compared to that of Corum, and we know (or at least we should) that Corum is a beast -- does underperforming that guy mean you’re not good? Not necessarily, and while such caveats have historically been more harmful to evaluative accuracy than they’ve been helpful, it’s also possible that -- in this particular instance -- quality intrateam competition is deflating the team-relative numbers for a player who is better than they reflect.

In order to get to the bottom of this conundrum, I recently watched and charted all of the all-22 film I could find on Edwards: the 2022 games against Iowa, Penn State, and Ohio State that saw him gain 418 yards and score 4 touchdowns on just 43 carries. Grades generated and insights gained from that charting process are below.

The clearest takeaway I have from my time spent watching Edwards’ film is his lack of play strength. His 48th-percentile mark in PFF’s missed tackles forced per attempt metric attests to that to some degree, and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s not pushing many piles or running over many linebackers given that he’s currently listed at a svelte 6’1 and 204 pounds, but he was remarkably ineffective through contact in the games that I watched. Of 25 runners for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of carries so far, Edwards ranks last in terms of powering through contact against defensive linemen, and it’s not really close:

He performs similarly poorly against linebackers and defensive backs, where he ranks 25th (again by a longshot, as his -0.77 mark is far lower than Chase Brown’s second-to-last -0.55) and 23rd, respectively. Edwards is the only guy I’ve watched who did not either break a tackle or gain extra yards through contact on any from-the-side tackle attempt from a linebacker in the sample of plays that I charted (for comparison, Kendre Miller did one of those two things on more than half of all such tackle attempts in the games I watched of him).

Basically, Edwards is a touch-him-and-you-got-him runner for many Big Ten defenders, which doesn’t bode well for his potential to contribute heavily as a between-the-tackles guy in the NFL. Further, he did not grade out as a very clean decision-maker on gap runs, where his tracking -- with numerous mistakes on a sample of just 25 runs -- was particularly problematic. He ranked second-to-last in that area (behind only Nick Singleton), contributing to an overall grade on gap runs that is the fifth-lowest among players I’ve watched. I don’t have a strong take on the source of those issues, but I saw multiple instances of Edwards running into the back of an offensive lineman during an upfield transition on an outside run with pullers, which raises questions in my mind about his peripheral vision, spatial awareness, or processing speed. It’s as if he’s laser-focused on getting to the outside or simply following to a designed gap, and when those objectives can’t be met, he transitions to something else without first reading where his new path will take him.

By contrast, Edwards appears much more composed on zone runs, where his patience and ability to manipulate defenders out of gaps shone even behind a strong run-blocking unit that didn’t ask him to make a ton of difficult reads. He didn’t carry the ball on a single outside zone run in the games I watched, but on split and inside zone concepts, the Michigan runner was excellent at hesitating in the backfield just long enough for a desired crease to materialize, and the following three plays against Penn State are great examples of the skills that saw Edwards earn the second-highest zone manipulation grade among anyone I’ve watched:

Overall, Edwards’ zone grade of 0.68 comes out slightly above the population average of 0.63.

One subjective observation I made during this process was Edwards’ propensity to seek the edge and bounce runs to the outside. Such a tendency doesn’t seem to be affecting him in any adverse way (and I therefore didn’t give him any negative grades on the plays that I noticed this), but when you add it to his lack of play strength and the dependency his per-carry output had on explosive open-field runs, you’re left with a picture of a skinny pass-catching running back who is dynamic out in space but shies away from dirty work on the interior. That can work when you have an athletic advantage over the college kids trying to defend you, but it’s a style of play that becomes harder to maintain at the next level. Because of that, I believe we should approach Edwards as an NFL prospect in the same way that we approached Rachaad White, but armed with the benefit of having seen a similarly-built player in White struggle as a rusher early on in his pro career. My opinion of Edwards next offseason -- or whenever he decides to declare for the NFL Draft -- will therefore be largely determined by his athletic testing results (as those will offer insight into how well he might maintain a space-oriented running style at the next level), and until then, I’m operating under the assumption that Edwards is a bigger version of Nyheim Hines or James Cook.