By most accounts, Jaylen Wright is one of the most exciting prospects in this running back class, and I’m here to tell you how good he is. Many of my articles focus in on one particular aspect of a back’s profile – efficiency data, receiving skills, film analysis, etc. – but today we’re doing the whole shebang.

We’ll start with the basics: Wright is fast as shit and a tad skinny. We’ll get hard data on both of those fronts when he measures and tests at the Combine on Saturday, but historical weight gain patterns suggest that he’s likely to come in at 5’10 4/8” and 211 pounds. Such measurements would make him approximately the same size as Joshua Kelley, Jerome Ford, and Miles Sanders as well as give him a ratio of pounds to inches that ranks in the 42nd percentile among historical draftees. We also have pretty sound evidence of Wright’s speed. His personal best in the 100-meter dash is a 10.85 that he posted as a sophomore in high school, while the 6.25 mark he notched in the 55-meter dash as a junior was the second-fastest time in the entire country in 2020. As of November, he had reached the fastest on-field speed of any running back in college football last season:

It seems likely that Wright will flirt with the 4.40 threshold in the forty-yard dash on Saturday, and a time of 4.42 (as Shane Hallam predicts) would produce a 92nd-percentile Speed Score of 110.7 (assuming my weight projection). Spreadshirt virgins, get the Jergens ready.

As I am wont to point out, though, athletic testing data only feels around in the dark for guys who seem like they might run the football well. To get a clearer and more holistic sense for how good a running back is at running the ball, we have to *gasp* look at how good he has been at running the ball. To that end, here are Wright’s career marks in various rushing efficiency metrics:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I think I’m up to the challenge. Perhaps the strangest dynamic present in Wright’s efficiency profile is the disparity between his Chunk Rate+ marks and his Breakaway Conversion Rate. Both of these metrics describe a back’s ability to create explosive plays, but from slightly different angles. CR+ is a team-relative derivative of raw ten-yard run rate, which Wright has always looked good through the lens of. He rips off ten-yard gains at a high clip, whether considered in the context of the wide open Tennessee Volunteer offense or not. Given how fast he is, this makes complete sense. What makes less sense is the fact that he fails to convert those ten-yard gains into longer, breakaway runs of twenty yards or more at anything close to an impressive rate.

Consider the population of recent draftees who entered the league after having posted marks in at least the 75th percentile in both CR+ and the forty-yard dash – in other words, the guys who are remarkably fast (a time of 4.46 marks the 75th percentile in my local database) and who created explosive plays at a considerably higher rate than their collegiate teammates (posting a CR+ of at least 3.5%). As you might expect, these players tend to be good in the open field: 61% of them left school with above-average marks in BCR, while their collective average in that metric would rank in the 60th-percentile among all recent prospects. Assuming Wright runs at least 4.46 this weekend, his career BCR would stand as the second-lowest for any player in that group (ahead of only Daniel Lasco, who was a seventh-round pick back in 2011). Among the recent prospects who converted more of their explosive runs into breakaway runs than Wright did in college are Dan Herron, Kenny Hilliard, Marcus Murphy, and David Cobb (all of whom ran 4.6+).

I did not get the impression from Wright’s film – of which I have watched and charted five games’ and 68 carries’ worth – that such a statistical dynamic is due to some inability he has as an open-field runner. Rather, I think his relative lack of breakaway success can be mostly attributed to a seemingly unrelated feature of the Volunteer running game: incredibly light defensive fronts.

If you’re facing an inordinately low number of defenders in the box on your average carry (and Wright was), you’re almost necessarily going to face an inordinately high number of defenders in the downfield area of the field. Because of this reality, while it was easier for Wright to gain three, four, five, or ten yards on a given run than it was for a random running back on pretty much any other college team, it was equally harder for him to turn his trips to the second and third levels of the defense into breakaway gains deep into the open field than it was for guys who’d bypassed normal box counts and were therefore facing normal amounts of would-be tacklers out in the secondary.

As I’ve just suggested, the historically low box counts that Wright faced in the last two seasons mean that his impressive raw efficiency numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. In 2022, Wright’s yards-per-carry average of 6.01 ranked 21st out of 85 high-volume runners in the Power Five conferences, while in 2023, both his 7.43 average and his 25.7% explosive run rate ranked second among 83 such backs. But if you’re the only guy at that level of competition running into such Mickey Mouse defensive fronts, should we really be surprised when you average more yards per carry than everybody else? Perhaps not.

Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate do a decent job of correcting for such a dynamic, however, and Wright looks fine by both metrics. His career marks in those areas are fairly mediocre (owing mostly to an 85-carry sample on which he wasn’t particularly good as a freshman), but in 2022 and especially 2023, Wright’s situationally-contextualized numbers were impressive. He finished last season by posting a 128.9% BAE Rating and a 2.4% RSR relative to teammates who averaged 3.50 stars as high school recruits, and – accounting for volume in addition to those three metrics – the following single-season performances are the ten most similar (since 2018) to his junior year numbers:

That’s not a gauntlet of superstars, but Dexter Williams and Javon Leake both made rosters at the next level (Leake apparently turned out to be a dominant punt returner in the CFL), Michael Carter and Zonovan Knight have both been solid professional contributors, and Donovan Edwards, Trey Benson, Michael Wiley, and Trevor Etienne are all thought to have exciting NFL potential. For my money, this isn’t bad company for Wright, and his team-relative efficiency does not represent a weakness in his profile.

Where the low box counts really affect my perception of the Tennessee back, though, is in their removal of almost anything resembling NFL-type rushing situations from his collegiate tape. The absolute lightest defensive fronts seen by any 100+ carry runner in the NFL in 2023 (those faced by Rachaad White, with an average of 6.77 men) were nearly a full defender heavier than those Wright faced in 2023, while no professional back with even ten attempts in a single season in the last three years faced as few defenders in the box as the 5.96 that he encountered on his average carry last season. Any pre-draft evaluation involves projecting a player’s skill-set up to a level of competition that he’s never seen before, but that’s more true for Wright than it is for any other (non-FCS) running back in this class (or for most running backs in recent memory), so much so that it’s hard to make any sweeping declarations about his cognitive approach to solving problems at the line of scrimmage.

That’s the case because – as a consequence of those light defensive fronts – Wright simply didn’t have to make many decisions on a play-to-play basis. His offensive line wasn’t steamrolling opponents (they ranked just 48th out of 68 Power Five units in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking rating), but their wide splits and exotic formations leading to low box counts meant that a) holes were often huge anyway, and b) there were frequently multiple viable gaps to choose from on any given play (also according to PFF, Wright ranked third among the 83 high-volume Power Five runners in yards before contact per attempt) . In my film-charting process, I give runners a positive, neutral, or negative grade in each of six different decision-making categories on every carry. In the category of vision, the population of players for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of runs in the last two years collectively earn a neutral grade on 52.8% of their zone runs; Wright’s rate of neutral vision grades on zone runs is a whopping 73.3%, easily the highest of any back I’ve studied (it’s 6.6% higher than Quinshon Judkins’ second-place mark and nearly double the population-low neutral rate belonging to Zach Evans). On gap runs – which accounted for around 75% of Wright’s carries in the games that I watched, both according to my categorization and PFF’s – his neutral vision rate came out to 84.9%, the fourth-highest mark in the population and 13.8% higher than the population average. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to grade out neutrally on a high percentage of plays (it’s literally neutral), but it does mean that I have less idea of Wright’s ability to read and react to stimulus from blockers and defenders than for any other back I’ve watched.

Wright does often manage to maximize what’s been blocked for him, though. Even prior to the impact of his explosive speed, he displays a helpful tendency to press close to his blocks in order to draw defenders into traffic, to feint one direction before hitting a newly-unoccupied gap, and to hold off on charging through an open crease until a late-developing block is able to clear out even more space than would have been available otherwise. His discipline and patience on gap plays both graded out well for me (discipline notably so), while on zone runs he earned the highest manipulation grade for any back I’ve yet studied. Here’s a quick compilation of some of those plays:

Overall, though, the weird Volunteer offense makes it difficult to evaluate Wright from a decision-making standpoint, so much of anyone’s opinion of him should be informed by his physical and athletic traits. We already established that he’s fast and somewhat skinny, but he also has really nice contact balance. He’s not a dancer (his avoidance rate is right around the population mean), but his mark in Contact Solidity in the games that I watched is the lowest for any running back I’ve yet charted, and his through-contact success versus both defensive linemen and defensive backs is above average. His solid numbers in missed tackles forced and yards after contact per attempt – he ranked fifth in the entire country in the latter metric in 2023 – are further proof of his high-level ability in this area. He just doesn’t take a ton of direct shots, and his ability to contort his body, stay balanced, run through arm tackles, and even power for extra yards through more solid contact is consistently impressive (especially for a guy who isn’t very big):

My comp machine tells me that Jerome Ford and Miles Sanders were similar prospects as Wright currently is, and I think those players are good frames of reference for how we might view his range of outcomes at the next level (Dane Brugler comped him to Ford as well). At the least, he should be an explosive second option a la Ford, and at his peak, I can envision 1000-yard-level production from him, assuming a good situation like Sanders enjoyed in Philadelphia. If we really want to get out over our skis, we can call him a poor man’s Travis Etienne, complete with dubious cerebral skill, a tantalizing mix of speed and balance, and a pass-catching resume almost exclusively made up of screens and dump-offs (though it seems that Wright doesn’t have the same hands inconsistency that Etienne entered the league with).