I’m here to make the early case that Emani Bailey, who was just invited to the combine, deserves to be taken seriously in this running back class. We are obviously working without athletic testing data at this point, and I also have yet to reach the Bailey portion of my film-watching enterprise for this offseason, so the full picture of who he is as a prospect is still coming into focus. As things stand today, however, I can make the case – based on three general points that I will outline below – that Bailey has legitimate potential to contribute to both NFL and dynasty teams alike.

We’re certainly starting with the weakest of the pro-Bailey points I’ll be making today, but that doesn’t mean it would be accurate to describe his receiving abilities as an actual “weakness” in his overall game. To start with the most basic of requirements, it seems like he has no issues with simply catching the football. You’ll have to consult Matt Waldman for the hand-positioning analysis, but Bailey hauled in 87% and 94%, respectively, of the balls and catchable balls thrown his way over the course of his four-year career at both Louisiana and TCU. Those marks are in the 87th and 78th percentiles, respectively, among historical prospects, and were not posted on an exclusive diet of checkdowns and screens. Bailey was lined up out wide or in the slot on a higher percentage of his career passing snaps than 84% of recent draftees (including Alvin Kamara, Rachaad White, and D’Andre Swift), his average target came beyond the line of scrimmage (0.3 yards), and he leaves school with a cumulative mark in Route Diversity that lands in the 79th percentile. I don’t want to paint the picture that Bailey is some kind of route-running savant, but he has experience with several different route types, was made a regular part of the passing game at two different programs and under two different coaching staffs (he had 25 receptions last year at TCU and 15 in 2021 at Louisiana), and can be relied upon to catch the ball, even on deflections and downfield throws:

Now to the good stuff. Not only did Bailey run for over 1200 yards this season, he did it while ranking 32nd in raw yards per carry and 51st in raw Success Rate out of 83 Power Five runners with at least 100 attempts, and he did that behind a Horned Frogs offensive line that ranked 58th out of 68 Power Five units in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grade. Of the 28 backs who finished behind him in both categories, only two had offensive lines with worse run-blocking grades (Mario Anderson at South Carolina and Rodney Hammond Jr. at Pitt), while among those with more highly-graded offensive lines were names like Quinshon Judkins, CJ Baxter, and Nick Singleton. The rushing yards over expected machine over at campus2canton.com agrees with the framing that Bailey significantly outperformed his situational baseline this season: his average of 0.53 RYOE per attempt trailed only Ollie Gordon out of the eight 1000-yard rushers in the Big 12 (and it ranked sixth out of the 23 1000-yard backs in the Power Five conferences).

His marks in many other efficiency metrics also look good:

The fact that these are career numbers is worth pointing out: Bailey was not just a one-year wonder in college. The start of his career did see him fail to earn RB1 duties at a Group of Five program, but Louisiana finished both 2020 and 2021 with only one loss and ranked inside the top-16 teams in the country, and as a sophomore, Bailey easily led the team in yards per carry despite sharing a backfield with Montrell Johnson, who spent the last two seasons out-touching Trevor Etienne at Florida.

Bailey was even effective in a part-time role during his first year at TCU. While Kendre Miller averaged 6.25 yards per carry and Emari Demercado (yes, starting NFL running back Emari Demercado) averaged 5.62, Bailey averaged 8.06, and while Miller succeeded on 49.1% of his attempts and Demercado on 46.3% of his, Bailey succeeded at a 54.8% rate (and this wasn’t a situation where he boosted his numbers against cupcake competition, as 87% of Bailey’s carries that year came against Power Five opponents).

2023 was definitely Bailey’s magnum opus though. He posted a 159.5% Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and a 5.9% Relative Success Rate, ridiculous marks that are even better when you consider the caliber of his teammates: Trey Sanders is a former five-star guy who was Alabama’s RB2 as recently as 2021, while Cam Cook and Corey Wren were both four-star recruits. Considering rushing volume in addition to the factors of BAE Rating, RSR, and teammate talent, the list of recent seasons that are most comparable to Bailey’s 2023 contains at least as many NFL contributors as non-, including some of the most dynamic rushers in the league:

I’m also a fan of the stylistic features in Bailey’s rushing profile. His career rate of missed tackles forced is not as impressive as its 76th-percentile ranking would indicate given changes in PFF’s charting methodology (it lands more or less in the middle of the 2024 class), but Bailey improved notably in that area late in his career. After forcing 0.24 missed tackles per attempt against Sun Belt competition at Louisiana, he forced 0.30 per attempt in two seasons against Big 12 defenses at TCU. In 2023, Bailey’s MTF average of 0.31 ranked 15th out of the 83 Power Five runners with 100+ carries.

As a whore for guys who don’t rely on explosive plays for their rushing output, Bailey’s elite Chunk Rate+ pairs exceedingly well with his mediocre Breakaway Conversion Rate in my eyes. Despite the fact that his career-end mark in raw ten-yard run rate is a 19.9% than would have ranked 14th among our group of 83 Power Five backs this season, Bailey gained just 30.3% of his total yardage in the open field, a portion that’s fairly average among recent prospects. I say that like it’s a good thing not because I’m happy that Bailey isn’t an elite open-field runner, but because that means his efficiency is being earned over and over again close to the line of scrimmage. Film study will provide more clarity on these suspicions, but such a dynamic is typically not seen in the data profiles of rushers without sound decision-making processes.

I don’t think the actual point I’m making here is as vapid and lazy as the above tagline would suggest, but it is both subjective and hard to articulate. To phrase it as straightforwardly as I can: there are numerous elements of Bailey’s profile that strike me as the kinds of things that appeal to NFL evaluators. Maybe it’s better to think of this point as multiple considerations joined by a loose theme.

The first of those is Bailey’s stout build. He weighed in at the Senior Bowl at 208 pounds on a sub-5’8 frame, making him not so much a small back as just a short one. His pounds-to-inches ratio of 3.09-to-1 shows him to be more densely built than workhorse types like David Johnson, Zach Charbonnet, Kareem Hunt, and Breece Hall, and his overall measurements are very similar to those of Maurice Jones-Drew. From a purely physical standpoint, Bailey is kind of just a thicker version of Devin Singletary or Michael Carter.

I think that stoutness is one aspect of a subtle blue-collar element to Bailey’s appeal. For starters, bulking up appears to have directly benefited him on the field, as he gained 0.46 more yards after contact per attempt while listed at 207 pounds in 2023 than he had at between 197 and 201 in the previous three seasons. Being small and quick but also having some dawg in you is seemingly en vogue in today’s NFL: four of the league’s five leading rushers – Christian McCaffrey, Kyren Williams, James Cook, and D’Andre Swift – all share significant stylistic overlap with the satellite back genre, while Mighty Mouse-types like Singletary, Jaylen Warren, Aaron Jones, Austin Ekeler, and Tyjae Spears have all been key parts of pro offenses in recent seasons. We know Bailey is undersized, he seems to be quick, and his through-contact numbers over at PFF suggest some level of dawg.

Bailey’s career arc also feels NFL-ish to me. It’s perhaps a coincidence that his two closest production matches in my post-2008 database are Chris Thompson and Theo Riddick, two undersized RB1-level fantasy producers (Thompson was the RB10 in per-game PPR scoring in 2017, Riddick the RB8 in 2016), but the general story of “three-star recruit with two FBS offers is super efficient on a dominant Group of Five team and then transfers to a bigger school and almost wins a natty while being super efficient in a part-time role and then dominates as a lead back in his final season” just feels like the kind of rags-to-riches story that a ruff-ruff football guy – with which NFL scouting departments are stocked – loves to hear.

Of course, the crown jewel for any ruff-ruff football guy is a Senior Bowl stand-out, and Bailey was one of the biggest at this year’s event:

I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m done with his film, but I think this quick survey of Bailey’s profile is enough to regard him as some kind of sleeper in this running back class. He appears to be a competent receiver, he was efficient and dynamic on the ground throughout his college career, he’s stoutly built and apparently quick, and he showed out at the Senior Bowl. Far worse prospects have garnered hype in recent years, and I think there’s a chance that Bailey is actively good. Two years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him filling one of the valuable niches that undersized backs around the league have found themselves thriving in in recent seasons.