Outside of this one vaguely positive tweet from Cody Carpentier, I have seen zero buzz about Marshall running back Khalan Laborn this offseason. That makes sense considering he’s a sixth-year declare from a non-Power Five program, but on the other hand, Laborn just put together a 1513-yard rushing season that includes a 163-yard game against Notre Dame and tops the career-best marks for small-school, Combine-invitee runners in this class like Keaton Mitchell (1452), Camerun Peoples (1124), and Deneric Prince (729).

The six-year career thing is obviously an important piece of information, but if Mohamed Ibrahim and Xazavian Valladay are worthy of consideration in this class, and if Devontae Booker and Joe Williams were worthy of consideration during their respective pre-Draft cycles, then I don’t see how we justify glossing over Laborn. The Herd runner will be 24-years old when the NFL season kicks off this fall, but along with Ibrahim, so were historical prospects like Javorius Allen, Shonn Greene, Patrick Laird, Phillip Lindsay, Jordan Wilkins, the aforementioned Booker, Rashad Jennings, James Starks, Andre Ellington, Danny Woodhead, Cameron Artis-Payne, and Bernard Scott before their own rookie seasons. We’re not talking about superstars here, but every player in the above list was a solid NFL contributor after being “too old” as a prospect, and Greene, Lindsay, Jennings, Ellington, and Woodhead all have multiple fantasy-relevant seasons with at least 1000 yards from scrimmage on their resumés.

Shonn Greene posted two-straight 1000-yard rushing seasons with the New York Jets after entering the league as a 24-year old rookie with one season of legitimate production at Iowa.

We don’t know what’s in store for Laborn, but just as the high-end production he posted during his final season speaks to some hypothetical upside, so does the fact that he was a 5-star recruit and the highest rated all-purpose back in the entire 2017 class (his 247Sports Composite rating during his time as a recruit was 0.9867, higher than those of guys like Nick Chubb, D’Andre Swift, and JK Dobbins and trailing only those of Bijan Robinson and Zach Evans among 2023 backs). Laborn’s journey to the NFL (if that is indeed where he ends up) has been a strange one since he initially signed with Florida State out of high school -- the emergence of fellow 5-star runner Cam Akers likely contributed to Laborn’s taking a redshirt year as a true freshman, and he then suffered a “serious knee injury” in the second game of the 2018 season that caused him to miss the rest of the year. Laborn returned as Akers’ primary breather back in 2019, but then was dismissed from the Seminoles for violating team rules, completed his degree in Tallahassee while taking both 2020 and 2021 off from football, and then tore apart the Sun Belt Conference as a super-duper-senior last year at Marshall.

It’s not a traditional resumé by any means, but I’m inclined to look for reasons to believe in players, and while getting beat out by Cam Akers before getting hurt and then breaking team rules is not a positive sequence of events, those things also don’t disqualify Laborn from still being a talented football player.

What also doesn’t disqualify him is his performance at Marshall’s Pro Day, where he posted some of the most impressive athletic testing numbers among all runners in this class:

Those marks would have ranked sixth, third, third, first, and second, respectively, among 2023 backs at the Combine, and while Laborn apparently didn’t get measured at his Pro Day, the following historical prospects are the most similar to him from a physical standpoint (considering athleticism in addition to height and weight) if we assume that he’s the 5’10 ⅛ and 212 pounds that his yearly listed measurables would portend (based on historical data for eventual NFL backs):

Not a bad list! Green, Addai, and James are all obvious studs, but given the presence of Michel, Mason, and Sanders in this group, the hit rate for Laborn’s comps is better than 50% if we’re simply looking for guys who will contribute points to our fantasy lineups (which should probably be our aim with unheralded prospects like Laborn).

If Laborn is going to follow in the footsteps of those quality backs, however, he’ll need to resemble them in ways that are not simply superficial. Unfortunately, an examination of our guy’s rushing efficiency profile is where it all starts to come apart:

Because Pro Football Focus has (seemingly) changed their charting criteria for missed tackles forced in recent years, even the lone above-average mark in Laborn’s advanced rushing profile is probably sub-standard, giving him a clean sweep of mediocrity in this department. We can’t even really give him a subjective boost for having played with Akers here, because the 302 carries that Laborn handled last season at Marshall represent over 80% of his career total, and he wasn’t impressive from a team-relative efficiency standpoint then either:

Relative to teammates who collectively averaged a 1.33-star rating as high school recruits (a mark in the 2nd percentile among teammates of backs drafted since 2007), Laborn’s completely neutral mark in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating indicates that Marshall was just as well off when handing the ball to their “other” running backs last season as they were when handing it to Laborn. His abysmal Relative Success Rate indicates that a given carry from those other guys was far more likely to have a positive result than a carry from Laborn.

That simply will not cut it. Laborn is an excellent athlete with elite pedigree and (probably) good size, but if he can’t produce more with his opportunities as a 23-year old than his Sun Belt-quality backfield mates do with theirs, why should we expect him to be able to hang with NFL-quality teammates? If he can’t break tackles or rip off breakaway runs at an impressive rate against the likes of Bowling Green, James Madison, and Georgia Southern, why should we expect him to have success against the New York Jets, Cincinnati Bengals, or San Francisco 49ers?

Laborn is not the first player to leave college with an impressive athletic profile paired with poor on-field efficiency. I don’t make use of these numbers much, but I’m able to generate composite scores in various categories using the data points I reference in my evaluations, and according to those composites, the following is a comprehensive list of all the post-2007 prospects in my database who boasted 70th-percentile-or-greater athleticism to go along with sub-30th-percentile rushing efficiency marks:

McFadden, Mitchell, Sanders, and Pollard are all definite hits (and I’d also probably count Tate and Mason), but the vast majority of players here ended up as depth pieces in the NFL at best. Laborn is even unique among this group as he owns the worst rushing efficiency profile, and you can’t make the same excuses for him as you could for McFadden, Sanders, Pollard, and others -- all three of those guys played with NFL-caliber teammates (Felix Jones, Saquon Barkley, and Darrell Henderson) who contributed to suppressed team-relative efficiency marks.

Ultimately, I don’t think Laborn is good enough to do much more than make an NFL roster, and I’d even consider him a longshot to succeed by that standard. He’s a fun player who I’m glad was able to earn some redemption through a productive season last year, but the college fantasy sickos will probably be the last of us to benefit from Laborn’s contributions to their lineups, at least until next season’s XFL DFS contests roll around.