As the current 1.06 in rookie drafts and RB8 in dynasty overall (according to KeepTradeCut), the 199-pound Jahmyr Gibbs is a fairly unique proposition as an undersized running back who the dynasty community expects to be a high-end fantasy asset. I think it’s reasonable to ponder whether that uniqueness is a good or bad thing.

In recent years, the approximate threshold for RB2-level production in PPR is 12 points per game, and since the turn of the century, there have been 28 running backs to eclipse such a threshold at lighter than 205 pounds (according to Pro Football Reference):

Those 28 backs combined for a total of 65 RB2-or-better-level seasons in the post-2000 era, meaning we get an average of 2.8 sub-205-pound runners to produce like fantasy starters in a given year. The rarity of players in this archetype is evident, but even within it, I would argue that Gibbs doesn’t really look much like any of his successful predecessors (let alone like the 214-pound Alvin Kamara, the 212-pound D’Andre Swift, or the 208-pound Aaron Jones that he often gets compared to).

To start, it’s not really fair to say that Gibbs closely resembles any of the guys on this list whose roles and performances as collegiate ball-carriers spoke to a more legitimate degree of workhorse-type potential than Gibbs’ does -- his career numbers in carries per game, Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating, and Relative Success Rate land in the 44th, 21st, and 18th percentiles, respectively, among backs drafted since 2007.

Gibbs averaged 12.4 carries per game over his career and maxed out at 151 carries in a single season -- if we say that any player who averaged at least 15 carries per game (a round number that conveniently also marks the 67th-percentile threshold) or totaled at least 200 carries in a single year established a level of workhorse potential that Gibbs did not, then we’re safe to eliminate the following players from the Gibbs precedent sweepstakes: Bradshaw, Charles, Cohen, Ekeler, Ellington, Faulk, Forsett, Gaskin, Hillman, Johnson, Lewis, Lindsay, Powell, Rice, Singletary, Slaton, Spiller, Sproles, Westbrook, Williams, and Woodhead.

Among the seven players left, I feel comfortable making a subjective determination to eliminate Elijah Mitchell on the double basis that he a) was listed at 217+ pounds throughout college, and b) is clearly not a member of the same dynamic space back archetype that Gibbs belongs to, regardless of what he weighs.

The remaining runners are Jahvid Best, Warrick Dunn, Charlie Garner, Nyheim Hines, Theo Riddick, and Chris Thompson. Gibbs shares undeniable physical similarities with Best:

Those numbers mean that Best is Gibbs’ closest physical match (at 95.9% similar) in my entire database. Despite that, the stylistic comparison between the two of them is dubious given the large difference in ineffectiveness the two of them brought to the table as collegiate runners: Gibbs posted marks of 0.34 in YPC+ and 0.2% in Chunk Rate+ (both in the 41st percentile) relative to teammates that averaged a collective 3.47-star rating as high school recruits at Georgia Tech and Alabama, while Best’s numbers were 0.78 and 1.1% (marks in the 60th and 52nd percentiles), respectively, relative to 3.74-star teammates at Cal (a group that included a 1000-yard NFL rusher in Justin Forsett and a solid NFL contributor in Shane Vereen). Gibbs was a below-average collegiate runner (by quality NFL prospect standards, let alone productive NFL player standards) at two different programs and in all three of his seasons, while the same can’t be said of Best at any point in his college career.

Still, if the physical similarities are enough for the 22 fleeting games’ worth of high-end RB2 numbers we got from Best (he averaged 14.2 PPR points per game) before his career was cut short by concussion issues to count as Gibbs precedent, then our list of supposedly Gibbs-like players includes three guys who were legitimately good at a thing that Gibbs was not good at in college (adding value in the running game) in Best, Garner (who posted a 1.51 YPC+ on Tennessee teams that ended back-to-back seasons ranked 12th in the AP poll, a mark that lands in the 86th percentile and just bests the career figures of Jonathan Taylor and Kenneth Walker, and who Matt Waldman wrote “was a more physical runner [than Gibbs]” in this year’s Rookie Scouting Portfolio, a key and common difference between Gibbs and many of the backs that folks want to comp him to), and Dunn (whose YPC+ mark of 1.66 lands in the 89th percentile and was posted on Florida State squads that finished in the top-four of the AP poll in four straight seasons) in addition to three pure satellite backs in Hines, Riddick, and Thompson. Gibbs obviously belongs to the same subcategory that those last three guys do, and while Gibbs boasts a more robust production profile than any of them can -- the heaviest career workload among the three of them was the 7.1 carries per game that Thompson averaged at Florida State, and Gibbs broke out with a 29.6% Dominator Rating as a true freshman while the earliest DR above even 20% among the other three backs was the 22.3% mark that Hines notched as a junior -- peak single-season touchdown and yards from scrimmage numbers from those three guys are right there with Gibbs’ best marks, and it’s also true that both Hines and Thompson performed significantly better in YPC+ than Gibbs did (their marks of 0.92 and 1.43 land in the 66th and 83rd percentiles, respectively), albeit on lower volume. Thomas is a rough physical approximation of Gibbs as a 4.42 runner at 5’7 and 192 pounds, but at 95.2% similar, Hines is nearly as close a match as Best is:

Hines is also one of the few backs who entered the league as a more versatile receiving threat than Gibbs currently profiles as. While Gibbs was lined up out wide or in the slot on 14.2% of his collegiate passing snaps, Hines spent the first year of his career playing wide receiver and lined up somewhere other than the backfield on a massive 67% of his career snaps (a 98th-percentile mark compared to Gibbs’ in the 77th). While Gibbs was targeted nearly a yard downfield on average (his 0.9 aDOT lands in the 62nd percentile), Hines was targeted 6.8 yards downfield (97th percentile), and despite that massive disparity in both distance and degree of difficulty on would-be receptions, Hines’ career catch rate of 94.4% smashes even Gibbs’ True Catch Rate of 88.8%.

I’m not here to argue, though, that Nyheim Hines was a better running back prospect than Jahmyr Gibbs is, because I don’t believe that. Even with advantages in notable areas, it means something that Hines was not nearly as well-regarded by the tape-grinding community as Gibbs currently is, and the edge that Gibbs has on Hines as a runner out in space is both large -- he forced 0.10 more missed tackles on a per-attempt basis than Hines did (a difference that puts Gibbs’ mark in the 86th percentile and Hines’ in the 35th) -- and probably pretty meaningful. Gibbs is a highly-touted prospect because he has a unique sort of slippery elusiveness in the open field on top of being an explosive athlete and skilled receiver, and while Hines fulfills the latter two criteria in the same way, he can’t touch Gibbs in the former.

Nonetheless, Hines (as well as Thompson and Riddick) is at best precedent for a Gibbs-like player to produce at a low-end RB2 level in the NFL, which would not be a satisfactory outcome for those selecting Gibbs in the mid-first round of rookie drafts. We’ve already established that Gibbs is not particularly Best-like as a prospect, but even Best-level production in the NFL would be a disappointment for a player already being valued as an RB1 in dynasty. Gibbs needs to be better than that.

Jahvid Best was a legend at Cal before concussions ended a promising start to his NFL career.

The two players left from our original list are Warrick Dunn and Charlie Garner, who were better than that -- Dunn posted four straight seasons of 15+ points per game from 2000 to 2003 in the midst of nine straight seasons of 12+ points per game from 1997 to 2005, while after a slow start to his career, Garner posted four straight seasons of 14+ points per game from 1999 to 2002 that included three seasons above 16 points per game and one season above 21 points per game. These two backs also satisfy some of the college-related Gibbs precedent criteria that the Hines and Thompson types do not, particularly in that they were legitimately awesome college players. Just as Gibbs is a projected second-round pick after posting a 22.7% Dominator Rating in his final season on a two-loss SEC team, Garner was a second-round pick after posting a 20.2% Dominator Rating in his final season on a two-loss SEC team. Dunn was almost undeniably a better college player than Gibbs, as he was drafted in the first round after notching three straight seasons of at least 1300 yards from scrimmage and 9 touchdowns on top-five-ranked Seminole squads while finishing ninth in Heisman Trophy voting as a junior and fifth as a senior -- Gibbs has one season with such numbers and garnered no significant Heisman buzz.

If Garner and Dunn are acceptable Gibbs precedent, then buying into Gibbs as a highly productive NFL back means buying into something that hasn’t happened in the last 25 years, and if they aren’t, it means we gotta go even further back.

Charlie Garner was an undersized runner with pass-catching chops who was a late-blooming stud in the NFL.

At this point, I’m probably fielding screams of “what about Jamaal Charles?!” or “what about Chris Johnson?!” or “what about Christian McCaffrey?!” or “what about Marshall Faulk?!”, and while I understand your point, I think defaulting to those comps gives Gibbs credit for things that we should have serious questions about. Despite being undersized, McCaffrey had a touches-per-game college workload that lands in the 85th percentile among historical prospects and exceeded the touch loads that guys like Bijan Robinson, Todd Gurley, and Le’Veon Bell handled in college. Faulk’s was bigger yet than that (Waldman also pointed out in the Gibbs section of the RSP that “Faulk’s contact balance [was] special for his size”, another trait that Gibbs doesn’t really share), and even Johnson and Charles had single-season workloads that were 78 and 80 touches, respectively, greater than Gibbs’ heaviest. Gibbs does play a bit like McCaffrey and a bit like Faulk and a bit like Johnson and a bit like Charles, but none of them entered the NFL without having answered at least one of the “can he handle a workload?” or “can he run inside?” questions that Gibbs has yet to answer.

The same is true of Reggie Bush, the guy who I’ve landed on as an aspirational point of reference for the sort of role and production we can hope for from Gibbs in the NFL. I don’t think Gibbs plays particularly similarly to Bush in an aesthetic sense, but as a guy who opened his pro career with three straight seasons of over 16 points per game while not carrying the ball more than 157 times or even averaging more than 3.8 yards per carry in a season, Bush represents the path to success for a dynamic space back with dubious inside running and workload-handling abilities. But even so, Bush was a far better prospect than Gibbs is -- he won a Heisman as a junior after finishing fifth in voting as a sophomore, left school with a 237-touch season on his resumé, and, as a guy who posted a 96th-percentile mark of 2.30 YPC+, was one of the most dynamic college runners we’ve ever seen -- so expecting Gibbs to match Bush’s production isn’t the best way to justify drafting him as an RB1 before we even know what team he’s on.

Reggie Bush was better than Jahmyr Gibbs, but his role with the Saints is the best example I can think of for how a Gibbs-like player might be optimally deployed in the NFL.

I say all of that to say that your Gibbs comp is bad, my Gibbs comp is bad, and all the other Gibbs comps are bad. The guys who actually play like him weren’t as good as him in college, and the guys who check the superficial boxes for how a player like Gibbs is supposed to succeed in the NFL either don’t actually play anything like him or were simply better prospects than he is.

All of that brings us to the central question, not just with the Gibbs projection, but with projecting college players to the pros in general: should we care about precedent? Does uniqueness mean that we should expect a player to succeed where others like him (in Gibbs’ case, that would be satellite backs like Hines, Thompson, etc., who we simply weren’t as high on coming out of college) did not? Or does that uniqueness mean that a guy doesn’t fulfill some necessary criteria (handling a workload, ability to run inside, etc.) that players we wish he was more like (in Gibbs’ case, that could be Garner, McCaffrey, Charles, Kamara, etc.) did fulfill and we should therefore be more apprehensive with his projection? The tone of this article has been somewhat anti-Gibbs, but I think that has more to do with attempting to question an apparently-consensus (as well as perhaps unwarranted and probably subconscious) opinion that uniqueness (at least in this case) is good than it does any actual anti-Gibbs position that I might hold, because I truly don’t know on which side of the “is Gibbs’ uniqueness good or bad?” question that I fall.

As it stands, Gibbs is my RB3 in this class and part of a tightly-grouped second tier of very talented players, any one of whom I could see having produced as the class’ RB2 when we look back in a few years. If Gibbs turns out to be that guy, it will be on the road less traveled -- either by earning a high-volume rushing workload that it currently appears he isn’t well-suited for, or by simply being the best pure satellite back we’ve seen in recent history. I’m not saying he can’t do it, but we should keep in mind what we’re betting on.