By this time of the NFL season, you have a pretty good idea of whether your dynasty teams are contending, racing to the bottom, or treading water in the no-man’s land of 3-3 mediocrity. I’m not here to offer advice on what strategic approach you should take in each of those situations (though -- regardless of the state of your dynasty squad -- I strongly recommend Jakob Sanderson’s recent piece on tearing your roster down), but rather to shed some light on how the upcoming rookie running back class stacks up against classes from the last few offseason cycles, and thereby greater equip you to a) calibrate your expectations for rookie drafts this spring, and b) appropriately value picks in those drafts by extension of those expectations.

There are several ways one could approach this exercise. I suppose the most obvious is smashing the upcoming rookie class in with 2021-2023 draftees into a super-ranking, but I’m not going to do that for a couple reasons: first, it wouldn’t really be fair to the people who pay for my running back rankings to drop them in an article, even if shrouded within the context of some meta-exercise; second, I think my opinions are less interesting than the data that informs them, and that simply telling you that whoever I have at RB4 in this class would land at RB9 in a super-ranking of the last three classes is both a) subject to change given how early we still are in this process, and b) less informative than showing you the reasons for which that might be true. So, I’m going to take a different approach: examining the relative collective strength of the upcoming class in terms of production profiles, workhorse potential, passing-game utility, and rushing efficiency numbers.

Because collegiate production is a large determining factor in the kind of draft capital that running backs receive (especially so before we have athletic testing data), and because the collective draft capital that a running back class receives is a decent proxy for how good the class is as a whole, we’re going to start with an examination of the level of capital we can expect to be spent on the 2024 running back class in the upcoming draft, based on their to-date production profiles and compared with the expectations that would have existed for the last few running back classes based on their own collegiate production profiles.

Contextualizing each player’s seasonal Dominator Rating with the S&P+ ratings (both overall and offense-specific) of the squad he played on, my process generates yearly scores for every running back in college football, scaled from 0-100 and relative to the numbers posted by other players at the same point in each runner’s respective career arc. In other words, I look at the market share production of a sophomore (or freshman, or junior, or whatever) in the context of how good his team and offense were during that particular season, and then generate a score by comparing his numbers versus the sophomore-season market share production of all other players in the context of how good their teams and offenses were during those seasons. From there, I can use yearly scores to a) judge the overall quality of a player’s entire career arc, and b) build projections for the level of draft capital he might receive in transitioning to the NFL. Using a process that I touch on in this article, I do the latter of those things by looking at the actual production score-informed career arcs of historical prospects taken in each round of the NFL draft, and then match current prospects to the composite profiles of the “average” running back taken in round one or round two or round three, and so on, with percent values that essentially serve as similarity scores. Thresholds based on minimum or maximum yearly scores can completely disqualify a player from projection into a particular round, but in general, whichever round has the strongest match to the player’s production profile is the one I project (again, based on production alone) in which he’ll be selected.

For example, here are a few players from the 2023 running back class, listed with their yearly production scores, their matches to each round-specific production profile, and their projected draft round based on the relative strength of those matches:

We can do the same exercise with the entirety of pretty much any draft class (though the sample of players informing the round-specific profiles is limited to post-2008 draftees), but what will be more informative for the purposes of this article is examining the amount of players in the 2024 running back class who currently project at each round (treating their to-date market share numbers in the current season as end-of-year numbers) compared to how many players projected at those rounds in the last few classes. Using eventual draftees from the 2021, 2022, and 2023 classes as well as a conglomerate of 20 notable running backs in the upcoming class (an average of 20 backs were drafted across the last three years) sourced from various rankings outlets that I found online (Pro Football Network, PFF, my own rookie rankings, etc.), here is that data:

And here is the distribution of running backs actually taken in each round in the last three years, along with projections for the 2024 class:

Before we analyze the relative strength of the upcoming class through this lens, I want to point out how good this method has been at projecting draft capital in recent years. For a population of 58 players in the last three classes (I exclude FCS guys and those with fewer than two college seasons played, so Pierre Strong and Kenneth Gainwell did not have projections), this process has enjoyed a 31% exact-round hit rate and a 60% within-one-round hit rate (including 56% and 78%, respectively, for the 2021 class specifically), all while being completely blind to the names, schools, ages, weights, 40 times, receptions totals, efficiency numbers, film grades, and all other data points for players that would typically assist in predicting where they will go in the NFL draft.

Back to the topic at hand: our first table indicates that, while there is likely no first round running back in this year’s class, the amount of guys we can expect to get “decent” draft capital (which I’m subjectively defining as anywhere between the second and fourth rounds) this spring is about the same as it has been in the last three offseason cycles. One place this process has consistently overshot in those years has been in its projection of backs taken in the second round, but if we assume a few of those guys either fall to day three or don’t declare (of which either outcome seems possible for some of the current second round projectees, like Raheim Sanders), we’re looking at a distribution of draft capital in the 2024 class that doesn’t seem far off of what we encountered in 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Of course, there are considerations other than projected draft capital in assessing the strength of a class (and considerations other than production in projecting draft capital), so let’s look at the physical profiles of the 20 guys in our assumed 2024 group compared to those of the players in the three most recent running back classes. We don’t have athletic testing data from which to draw conclusions, but we do have a solid system by which to predict eventual Combine or Pro Day height and weight measurements, and therefore some numbers we can use to compare the 2024 class’ likely level of beefiness with those of classes of the recent past.

Informed by high school-to-NFL weight gain patterns for eventual draftees of the last fifteen years, here are the predicted average measurements for our 2024 running back group, as well as the average actual measurements for each of the last three classes and the percentage of those classes that fell (or are predicted to fall) into three different size buckets:

And here is the same thing, but limited to guys from the last three classes who were taken prior to round five and the dozen backs from 2024 whose current draft capital projections are earlier than round five:

Despite the presence of Bucky Irving and the best efforts of the Blake Corum hand-wringers, the 2024 running back class currently projects as the biggest, stoutest, and most consistently not-undersized of any group in the last four years.

While it doesn’t look to have the high receiving highs that we saw sprinkled throughout the 2023 class, 2024 is also currently on pace to be the most consistently competent receiving group among our four-class sample. Here are class averages in career-high target share, career receptions per game, and career yards per target, as well as the percentage of each group that lands above the 50th percentile in those metrics:

And here is the same thing, but limited to 2021-2023 guys who were selected before round five and 2024 guys who currently project to be selected before round five:

Finally, let’s take a look at how the upcoming class stacks up to recent groups in terms of rushing efficiency. There are many metrics we could use for this purpose, none of them -- given the subjective considerations required to distinguish performance between players at different levels of competition and operating within different offensive environments -- perfect on their own, so I’m opting for a combination of career marks in four different measures of rushing output and ability: raw yards per carry, Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, Relative Success Rate, and missed tackles forced per attempt. Here is that data for the 2021-2023 classes as well as to-date numbers for the 2024 class:

And here is the same thing, but limited to pre-round five draftees and projected pre-round five draftees:

Through this lens, the 2024 class of running backs looks like a relatively strong rushing group, even as many of the key players (most notably Raheim Sanders, Donovan Edwards, Will Shipley, and Trey Benson) are having down seasons that have damaged their rushing profiles.

There’s obviously a lot of time left before the picture of this class fully crystallizes and a lot of work left to be done (film study, closer data analysis, etc.) before opinions about the individual players in it can be etched in stone, but I think the bird’s-eye-view, quick and dirty survey we’ve done here can shed some light on its relative strength and the sort of approach one should take in valuing their rookie draft picks in anticipation of it. It’s a class largely made up of quality runners, functional receivers, well-built athletes, and solid producers, and while I agree with the general sentiment that there’s no Jonathan Taylor or Breece Hall or Bijan Robinson at the top of the 2024 group, I do think there are multiple day two-level players and quality NFL starters present, and certainly a bevy of role-playing contributor types sprinkled throughout.