MarShawn Lloyd committed to South Carolina as a 4-star player, the fifth-ranked running back in a stacked 2020 recruiting class (ahead of Jahmyr Gibbs and behind only Bijan Robinson, Zach Evans, DeMarkcus Bowman, and Tank Bigsby), and the most highly-touted runner in the program’s history since Marcus Lattimore back in 2010. Before he could even get started, though, Lloyd tore his ACL in preseason camp of his freshman season and missed the entire year, then slogged his way to 3.64 yards per carry as the third guy in the pecking order behind Kevin Harris and ZaQuandre White as a sophomore in 2021. He came back to play well as the Gamecocks’ lead back last season and is now at the other USC playing with Caleb Williams and for Lincoln Riley, and despite the injury history and slow start to his college career, I’m here to tell you that almost no matter where you have Lloyd ranked in devyland, it’s too low.

My first point to that end is that the only piece of evidence we have of a healthy Lloyd in college football is of him absolutely smashing on a per-carry basis in the best conference in the country. Here are his 2022 numbers in the rushing efficiency metrics that I like to look at most, listed along with his percentile ranks in those metrics relative to what eventual NFL draftees do over the course of their collegiate careers:

That’s the total package. The only other two guys across all FBS teams who posted Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate marks in 2022 at least as high as those Lloyd posted while also carrying the ball at least 100 times were Kairee Robinson and Frank Gore, Jr., who did their damage in the Mountain West and Sun Belt Conferences, respectively. Among Power 5 lead backs, Lloyd’s 163.9% BAE Rating was the best in the country, easily ahead of a next-best trio of studs in Nick Singleton, Eric Gray, and Devon Achane (154.3%, 152.6%, and 151.9%, respectively), and his 11.8% RSR ranked fourth among 64 RB1s from the top conferences. Without exaggeration, no running back in the country was as impressive in the context of the offense in which he operated as Lloyd was last season.

Those unconvinced by team-relative efficiency metrics might be more swayed by other situationally-contextualized numbers, and according to Jerrick Backous' Rushing Yards Over Expected model over at campus2canton.com, Lloyd produced 0.37 RYOE per attempt last year, a mark greater than the final season per-carry numbers for all but one running back (Tyjae Spears) selected on day one or two of the 2023 Draft. As he also broke tackles, ripped off chunk gains, and gashed defenses in the open field at elite or near-elite rates, I’m not sure what else you could hope to see from a college back than what we got from Lloyd last season.

Nick Singleton is rightfully considered a top-three running back in college football, and MarShawn Lloyd was arguably better than him as a ball-carrier last season.

I suppose one other thing you could hope to see from a college running back is the ability to contribute well in the passing game, and Lloyd has that too. He caught 18 passes in only nine games last year, which is good on its own, but the underlying usage-based metrics indicate some sneaky ability to be more than a checkdown hero as well. Lloyd was split out wide or in the slot on 14.5% of his passing snaps and ran a route tree with 89th-percentile Route Diversity and basic, dumpoff-type pass patterns accounting for just a 37th-percentile portion of his total inventory. On those patterns (of which the dig route was his speciality, accounting for 5.2% of his total routes run compared to its CFB-wide share of 1.6%), Lloyd earned targets at a 132.5% RATE, a mark in the 74th percentile across the last half-decade of college football. He’s not a perfect receiver -- 5 drops in the last two years -- but he checks the hard-to-check versatility boxes in ways that not many running backs do, especially among those who weigh 215 pounds, break a ton of tackles, and produce efficiently on the ground, a subset at the position that typically offers little beyond screens and checkdowns in the passing game.

The next piece of this pie is that Lloyd is now a USC Trojan and therefore set up to increase his stock through performing well on one of the best and most high-profile teams in the country. We don’t know how much of the backfield pie he’ll earn in 2023, but a lesser talent in Travis Dye touched the ball 166 times as USC’s lead runner last season, and I’d put that number near Lloyd’s healthy floor in the coming year. Aside from Lloyd being a great player, I’m confident in his ability to garner significant work in this offense due to the fact that the other guys here just aren’t world-beaters. Austin Jones was Dye’s main competition for touches a year ago, and he’s a decent receiving back but now a fifth-year player who hasn’t posted a positive RYOE per attempt or a BAE Rating above the 100% mark since 2019. Sophomore Raleek Brown is also on the team, and he posted a 31st-percentile BAE Rating to go with a 10th-percentile RSR as a freshman. Freshmen A’Marion Peterson and Quinten Joyner are on the depth chart, but as the RB18 and RB21, respectively, in this year’s recruiting class according to campus2canton.com’s 2023 Freshman Guide, neither of them seem like huge obstacles, and the only other backs on the spring roster are Darwin Barlow and Matt Colombo, a fifth-year senior who’s never done much and a redshirt junior who’s never even seen the field in college, respectively. Lloyd should clearly be the favorite for touches among this group, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he runs away with a majority of the work.

We don’t have to base our expectations for Lloyd’s 2023 production on my opinions of this USC backfield, though, as campus2canton.com has rankings and ADP for the upcoming college fantasy football season on their site right now. According to both of those resources, Lloyd is currently valued as the RB26 in college fantasy, and while I’m not personally super familiar with the CFF landscape, last season’s RB26 in PPR points per game was Toa Taua of Nevada, who averaged 19.7 points per game while totaling 42 receptions, scoring 12 total touchdowns, and gaining 1206 yards from scrimmage. Backs who scored in that range last season (within a half-point in either direction of 20.0 PPG) averaged 32.3 receptions, 1284.8 yards from scrimmage, and 13.1 touchdowns. Such numbers from Lloyd wouldn’t even constitute a massive improvement over what an historically unathletic fifth-year runner in Dye did in this same offense a year ago (he caught 21 passes, gained 1086 yards, and scored 9 touchdowns), but they’d also put him in the same range as what guys like Jahmyr Gibbs and Kendre Miller did on championship-contending teams in 2022. If Lloyd is going to put up numbers like that on a USC team that is supposed to finish as a top-five squad and in contention for a spot in the College Football Playoff, why wouldn’t he be in strong consideration for the sort of day two draft capital that (an injured) Miller received last month?

Kendre Miller rode strong production as an upperclassman on a CFP-contending TCU team to day two draft capital. Why can’t MarShawn Lloyd do the same thing at USC?

Now two years removed from the ACL injury that has subdued his devy value up to this point, Marshawn Lloyd’s relatively under-the-radar 2022 season contains underlying signs of dominance that could vault him into the top tier of running backs in the upcoming rookie class if paired with strong production on a nationally-contending team. We’ve seen prospects like Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet leverage late-career transfers into big numbers and fantasy-friendly draft capital in recent years, and I think that’s exactly what Lloyd has in store for us as Caleb Williams’ partner-in-backfield-crime this season. Acquire now, thank me later.