We’ve sort of danced around the MarShawn Lloyd evaluation so far this spring – I wrote about his film back in November, laid out his analytical receiving profile in February, and gave my thoughts on his athletic testing performance in March – but I wanted to publish a piece incorporating all of those elements into a complete pre-Draft take on his talent and NFL potential. I’ve watched two more games of his film – the late 2023 matchups versus Cal and Oregon, meaning I’ve now charted 91.5% of Lloyd’s touches from last season – in preparation for this article, and I’ve also dedicated a good amount of thought in recent weeks to how best to balance the pros and cons of his overall profile. Perhaps more than for any other back in this class, that balancing act is fundamental to Lloyd’s (e)valuation. In order to think our way through it, let’s start by dwelling on the good that can be found in his skill-set and resumé.

The most obvious “good” with Lloyd is his explosive athleticism and the things it allows him to do on the field. As a 220-pounder who runs 4.46, puts up 25 reps on the bench, and has above-average leaping ability, Lloyd’s ten closest physical comps in my database of historical draftees includes players like DeAngelo Williams, Lamar Miller, Jonathan Taylor, Antonio Gibson, Isiah Pacheco, Julius Jones, and Rashaad Penny, and that athleticism certainly shows up for him in live-game situations. Outside of the 2021 season that followed a 2020 torn ACL, Pro Football Focus says Lloyd forced an average of 0.38 missed tackles and gained an average of 4.01 yards after contact per attempt, and his yearly ranking in those metrics among Power Five backs with triple-digit carries (a group of 85 and then 83 players) were as follows:

Both of those things – making defenders miss and powering through contact – also showed up my film-charting. Among backs I’ve studied who attempt evasive maneuvers at above-average rates (so more frequently than the population average of once every 3.6 physical encounters with defenders), Lloyd is damn close to being the guy who succeeds on those attempted maneuvers most often:

If we want to throw Sanders out based on the one-game sample we’re working with for him (and I would), then Lloyd is the single most elusive runner I’ve studied in the last two years, at least out of the guys who deploy elusiveness as a large part of their arsenal. Those skills (and the explosiveness that enables them) pop out of the screen in Lloyd’s tape:

You’ll also notice in that compilation that – despite largely being a finesse runner – Lloyd is still capable of running with power. Again in my charting process, his success through contact versus linebackers ranks third out of the 15 guys I’ve studied in this year’s class, while his success through contact versus defensive backs is also above-average among qualifying runners. His testing in Indianapolis revealed him to be a thickly-built athlete (only Miyan Williams and Braelon Allen in this class pack more pounds per inch onto their frames) with good speed and impressive upper- and lower-body strength, and as both my and PFF’s charting shows, Lloyd is able to convert those qualities into functional on-field power.

Lloyd’s athletic traits also assist in his creation of big plays, another strength in his game. Among our earlier groups of Power Five runners with 100+ carries, he finished sixth in ten-yard run rate in 2023 and tenth in the same metric in 2022 (while running behind offensive lines that ranked 61st and 113th, respectively, in PFF’s run-blocking rating, and – specifically at South Carolina – while facing a 75th-percentile amount of men in the box on his average attempt). Lloyd’s high-end output continued once he reached the open field, as he converted 18 of his 44 chunk gains into breakaway runs of 20+ yards over the last two seasons, producing a Breakaway Conversion Rate from this healthy stretch of play that lands in the 91st-percentile and right around the career marks of explosive prospects (past, present, and future) like Travis Etienne, Trey Benson, Kenneth Walker, Joe Mixon, TreVeyon Henderson, and Keaton Mitchell.

Lloyd is also a good receiver. I have the impression from Twitter that many data-centric folks are down on this particular element of his profile, but I think he’s a clear case of a guy whose volume numbers belie his actual ability in the passing game. For one, he checks pretty much all the boxes that indicate to me that a guy has legitimate downfield ability as a receiver: he lined up out wide or in the slot on a high percentage of his passing snaps, he was targeted a full yard downfield on average, his Route Diversity ranked in the 75th percentile across his whole career, and even his small sample of 34 career receptions provides examples of impressive route-running skill and body control at the catch point (like this one). He also has a good feel for uncovering himself and being an active target for his quarterback in scramble drill scenarios:

That varied set of skills has resulted in sky-high receiving efficiency, as Lloyd sits atop of the class in yards per reception and very near the top of it in both yards per target and – speaking to his dynamic ability out in space – yards after the catch per reception. Among backs who played primarily against Power Five competition and who were drafted in the last ten years, only Kenyan Drake and Joe Mixon entered the league with YAC numbers as good as Lloyd’s on receiving volume at least as high as his.

The last of the “good” that I’ll point out in Lloyd’s profile is the control with which he navigates the backfield on gap plays, particularly those that find him following leads and pullers to the outside on power, counter, pin & pull, or trap concepts. On those types of runs, my charting process saw him produce some of the highest grades in patience, decisiveness, and manipulation of all qualifying backs, traits also noticed by Dane Brugler (“above-average patience and processing, and he uses blockers to his advantage”).

The combination of all these skills and traits (at least the ones relevant to his rushing performance) – size, strength, speed, lateral agility, stop-start explosiveness, a natural feel for navigating gap runs – was enough for Lloyd to outproduce the per-carry output of the other backs on both his South Carolina and USC teams, as he finished his college career with a 62nd-percentile Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 120.3%.

Lloyd is far from a perfect prospect, and there are substantial weaknesses in his game that need to be reconciled with. Some of the things that might show up as red flags in traditional analytical measures are not what I’d be primarily concerned with: his low-ish market share numbers reflect the effect of playing with a transcendent quarterback on a team stacked with receiving weapons more than they are indicative of any vague shortcoming in Lloyd’s talent profile (and the 25.3% Dominator Rating he posted on a top-25 South Carolina team in 2022 is hardly worthy of criticism), while the slow start to his college career is pretty easily explained by the ACL he tore on the second day of fall camp of his freshman year.

There are four general things that do concern me with Lloyd, however. Let’s go through them one-by-one, starting with his erratic tendencies on zone runs. To illustrate, here are Lloyd’s grades (and percentile ranks among nearly 40 qualifying backs) in each of the decision-making categories I evaluate on every run, as well as his overall grade and rate of negative grades on zone concepts:

These are bad numbers, and the tendencies they point to are corroborated by pretty much everyone else who watches Lloyd run. Brugler says the former Trojan “gets bounce-happy at times and passes up workable lanes for the unknown”, while Matt Waldman says “he has an inconsistent feel for when to bounce runs and misses opportunities for keeping the playbook open with good management of taking what he should get” (though Waldman actually sees these issues pop up more for Lloyd on gap plays). Lance Zierlein says he “will miss opportunities for splashy runs due to average vision”. As with Trey Benson, Lloyd’s athleticism enables him to get away with a lot of questionable decisions at the line of scrimmage, but he just as often can’t pull off a miracle and is left with an unnecessarily negative play (or, as his tracking grade indicates, sometimes he’s just sloppy enough in the backfield to run himself into trouble and thereby create a negative play out of thin air). Examples of these kinds of mistakes can be found in the film study article I wrote on Lloyd in November, and they contributed to a -2.1% career mark in Relative Success Rate (a 24th-percentile figure).

The second thing that concerns me with Lloyd is his ball security. I’m pretty confident that his career 64.2% catch rate (a ninth-percentile mark) can largely be explained by the frequency with which his targets came on downfield routes against actual coverage, but he did drop six passes in his career (producing a 12% drop rate that would rank as one of the worst in the country among backs with 15+ targets last season). That’s one thing, but the bigger concern is fumbles:

Lloyd’s rate of one fumble for every 36 touches is horrible (Bucky Irving, by contrast, fumbled once in his 570-touch career), and – as Mike points out – does not portend good things for his future playing time if he can’t clean up the issue. As far as I can tell, the stickiness of fumble issues from college to the NFL isn’t clearly established, but Lloyd might have more struggles than most in correcting his problem considering his small hands: they measure just 8 ¾”, a size that mockdraftable.com says is in the 14th-percentile among historical running back prospects (and is a half-inch smaller than the population average). This list of the NFL fumble rates for a completely cherry-picked list of historical prospects with sub-9” hands (selected because they were recognizable enough that I figured they’d all have a decent sample of career touches to work with, and, indeed, the lowest touchcount among them turned out to be 392) is illustrative of the kinds of problems we might see with Lloyd at the next level (also in the graphic is the collective fumble rate for all running backs with at least 100 touches in 2023):

There are some interesting names on this list (first because how the hell does Derrick Henry have such small hands?, and second because most of the players here are not guys who – to my knowledge – are well-known as having ball-security issues), and it’s certainly not a good sign that a large chunk of them have fumbled more frequently over their careers than the NFL average (or at least the one established by high-touch players from last season). This illustration is perhaps made more concerning by the fact that we don’t even know (though someone could take the time to find out) how often these guys were putting the ball on the ground before going pro. A quick look at the PFF pages for Devin Singletary and James Robinson (the lowest guys on the list whose college careers took place in the PFF era) reveals that they fumbled once every 184 touches and not at all across 487 touches, respectively, during their amateur careers. So not only does Lloyd fumble and not only does Lloyd have small hands, but it seems like he fumbles much more frequently than even other small-handed fumblers do.

The third thing I’m concerned about with Lloyd is his ability in pass-protection. I don’t have much analysis of my own here, but general consensus seems to be that he isn’t a great blocker. Brugler says Lloyd “has some rough reps on tape in pass protection”, Waldman points out some diagnostic issues he displays in this area (though he also calls him a “promising pass protector with the core strength to become a reliable bodyguard … if he curtails the lapses he has with reading the pocket”), Zierlein thinks he “lacks sand in his pants to protect his quarterback in blitz pickup”, and PFF rated him (out of 163 running backs with at least 15 targets in 2023) as the country’s 130th-best pass-blocking back.

The final thing that worries me with Lloyd is his lack of special teams experience. The only such unit on which he has more than two career snaps is punt return, and he returned zero kicks during his three seasons at South Carolina and USC. I don’t view the second point as a huge deal (insofar as Lloyd seems like he’d be a decent returner if that’s what a team wanted him to do), but the first could pose issues for Lloyd’s early opportunities. Parallels can be drawn between Lloyd’s situation and the Zach Evans experience we went through over the last few years: both guys were highly-touted recruits who ending up spending less time on the field and receiving fewer touches in college than we’d have liked to see, but they were nonetheless never presented with much need for proving themselves on special teams, and now that lack of experience is coming back to sabotage their ability to earn their way onto the field in the NFL. We’re speaking in hypotheticals about Lloyd, but his combination of ball-security issues, pass-protection lapses, and erratic decision-making at the line of scrimmage could put his coaches in the same kind of we-can’t-put-this-talented-guy-on-the-field-yet conundrum that Evans’ own inconsistencies put Sean McVay in last year, and we already know that Evans’ lack of special teams experience was a meaningful barrier to his being activated on game days early on in the season. If Evans and Lloyd didn’t have things that made them potential liabilities on offense it wouldn’t matter much if they could play special teams (because they’d already be active for the purpose of contributing heavily on offense, the exact dynamic that kept them from needing to play special teams in college), but one barrier to playing time begets another in this case.

That’s basically where I’m at. Lloyd is one of the most exciting and versatile players in this class, and he might be the single most dynamic out-in-space ball-carrier among 2024 backs (if it’s not him it’s either Benson or Will Shipley). Unfortunately, he also has a lot to clean up and refine in his game, and it wouldn’t shock me if those things significantly limit his ability to reach his potential in the NFL. He’s got Pro Bowl-level upside if he can manage to get his problem areas under control, while his range of outcomes also contains the career arcs and on-field roles of players like Miles Sanders, D’Andre Swift, Duke Johnson, and Kenyan Drake.