Welcome to the fourth stop on my what-do-I-write-during-this-weird-time-when-college-football-is-pretty-much-done-but-rookie-talk-needs-to-wait-until-the-NFL-season-is-over? train, where we have spent the last couple weeks taking a preview tour across the landscape of the 2025 running back class. Ollie Gordon, Trevor Etienne, and Ashton Jeanty all made for fun ventures, and the good times will continue to roll with today’s visit to Jaydn Ott in Berkeley, California.

Ott has been very productive through two seasons at Cal. He was named a Freshman All-American after totaling more than 1200 yards and scoring double-digit touchdowns from scrimmage in 2022, he led the Pac-12 in rushing with over 1300 yards this season, and his underclassman production profile (informed by his market share numbers and the S&P+ ratings of the teams he’s played on) is closely similar to those of past prospects like AJ Dillon, Justin Jackson, Sean Tucker, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Devin Singletary. Given that he’s one of the most accomplished runners currently in the FBS ranks, let’s take a closer look at what the on-field metrics say about his potential for fantasy-relevant contributions in the NFL:

I think it makes sense to view Ott as belonging to the same branch of the running back family tree as Jerome Ford. Like Ford, Ott is a relatively thin runner -- he’s six feet tall, is listed at just 200 pounds, and will likely (based on historical weight gain patterns) be a Tony Pollard-esque 211 during his eventual pre-Draft process -- with good long speed and home run-hitting ability:

As with Ford, that open-field dynamism is the primary draw in Ott’s game. He has more than 60 runs of ten or more yards through his two seasons in a Power Five conference, and his career marks in Chunk Rate+ and Breakaway Conversion Rate are both above-average relative to historical draftees. His similarities to Ford in this regard are pretty wild: the current Cleveland Brown ended his college career with a 3.0% CR+, a 36.7% BCR, and 31.3% of his total yardage having come at least ten yards beyond the line of scrimmage, while Ott has posted the above numbers and gained 30.3% of his total yardage in the open field.

Ott’s parallels with the man who might be the NFL’s most severe boom/bust runner (see 1, 2) do not end with big-play production. Ford entered the league after posting a Relative Success Rate of -5.2% -- the third-lowest mark among backs drafted in 2022 (ahead of only Trestan Ebner and Isaiah Spiller) -- to go with a Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 118.0% at Cincinnati and Alabama, numbers that closely approximate the ones Ott produced as an underclassman. Ott has posted BAE Ratings above the 110% mark and RSRs well into the negatives during both of his seasons at Cal, showing him to be an efficient runner on aggregate whose production comes largely on chunk gains interspersed between frequent unsuccessful attempts (for what it’s worth, his raw efficiency numbers support this interpretation of his game as well: out of 77 Power Five backs with 100+ carries in 2023, Ott finished his season ranked 29th in yards per carry and 44th in Success Rate). That dynamic is particularly present against heavier defensive fronts, as Ott has never finished a season with a higher Success Rate than what the collective other Golden Bear backs have posted against seven-, eight-, or nine-man boxes.

These elements combine to make Ott a less-than-definite bet to produce fantasy-relevant numbers as a pro, but I do think he’s capable of contributing in an NFL backfield. “Fast rb go brrr” doesn’t mean that running a sub-4.5 forty or generating an 80th-percentile Speed Score (or whatever) will guarantee a player success at the next level, but it does mean that explosive runners get the advantage of loaded dice when rolling to determine where they’ll land on their range of career outcomes. Consider again the example of Ford, who ripped off this field-flipping 69-yard touchdown after Nick Chubb went down in week two, a huge play in the midst of what was otherwise a slog of a first month that saw him average fewer than 3.3 yards on his other 59 touches. This isn’t a “take away the good plays and all you have are bad plays” take, but rather an illustration of the kind of impact that explosive play-making can have on a player’s chances of finding a solid role in the NFL. For all his faults, Ford has shown this season that he can play in the league, something that could have been true but may never have become apparent if he wasn’t able to make that one big play (would the Browns really have continued feeding him 15 touches per game if he’d only offered a steady stream of three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust-type output through the entire first month of the season?). “Fast rb go brrr” means that Ott has the advantage of being able to take advantage of his opportunities in similarly eye-popping ways.

Ott is also relatively attractive as a potential fantasy asset in light of the breadth of opportunities he seems capable of receiving at the next level, given that he has displayed baseline competence as a pass-catcher and made a positive impact in the return game during his college career:

The more areas in which a player can add value, the better odds of his impressing coaches and earning more opportunities, and while I don’t think we’re dealing with a supremely versatile receiving weapon with Ott, he probably doesn’t need to be pulled off the field in passing situations. He’s already caught over 70 passes in his college career (while averaging virtually the same number of receptions per game as Kyren Williams finished his Notre Dame career with, for example), including 90% of his catchable targets and while being thrown the ball an average of 1.1 yards downfield (a 67th-percentile aDOT that matches James Cook’s career mark). It’s true that he has never commanded targets at a high per-route rate on advanced routes types, but Ott also hasn’t been totally limited to the basics of the running back route tree. On a 240-route sample in 2022, Ott posted 76th-percentile Route Diversity, with a very high proportion of curl routes and above-average rates of out, dig, drag, and slant routes. In 2023, he was tasked with far less variety but was still weaponized on wheel routes and received heavy usage on screens and out in the flats.

The most curious thing about Ott’s receiving contributions -- especially in light of his open-field ability as a runner and returner -- is his low efficiency. Through heavy volume over two seasons, he has averaged just 5.9 yards per target, 7.5 yards per reception, and -- most strangely -- 7.3 YAC per reception, numbers in the 34th, 20th, and 10th percentiles, respectively, among historical draftees. We’ve already established that Ott is good with the ball in his hands as both a tackle-breaker and open-field yardage-eater, and we’ve also already established that Ott is perfectly capable of catching the balls that are thrown in his direction, so his failure to combine those processes into efficient receiving contributions should be interesting to us. Maybe it’s something that can be easily corrected via improved technique, or maybe it’s the result of situational factors (quarterback play, etc.) that won’t be present within other circumstances. I don’t know which of those explanations is true (and maybe it’s something else entirely), but as things stand today, it’s hard to say that Ott is anything more or less than a basically competent pass-catching running back. For whatever it’s worth, he also finished the 2023 regular season with the 17th-highest pass-blocking grade among 53 Power Five runners with at least 20 targets (according to Pro Football Focus).

Overall, I view Ott as a good college back who will probably be a fine professional back. I don’t think he’ll be the kind of guy that an NFL team would plan to enter a season with as their clear lead runner, but as with Ford (and guys like Chuba Hubbard, Israel Abanikanda, Ty Chandler), his explosive traits and history of (relatively) efficient production a) make him a good candidate to seize the day on limited opportunities early on in his career, and b) provide an excellent foundation on which to build a more refined and varied skill-set that could build him into a starting-level professional player. He’ll be interesting in rookie drafts, but in less of a you-gotta-get-this-guy sense and in more of a stash-him-and-he-could-pop vein.