Interspersed between dynasty-focused articles on specific NFL running backs and professional backfields, I’ve spent the post-draft portion of the offseason revisiting my takes on various collegiate runners, including Nick Singleton, Miyan Williams, Raheim Sanders, Marshawn Lloyd, and Blake Corum. I’ve come away from my explorations of both Singleton and Sanders feeling tentatively optimistic about their high-end potential, and the logical next step is to check in with Quinshon Judkins and assess the appropriateness of his RB3 ranking behind those other two backs.

To that end, I recently watched and charted three games from Judkins’ dominant freshman season, specifically the contests against Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky that saw the first-year phenom turn 64 carries into 455 yards versus SEC competition. The results of that charting process -- along with insights gleaned from cross-referencing the derivative film grades with Judkins’ performance in various advanced rushing efficiency metrics -- are below.

I want to start with the numbers. Judkins burst onto the scene as a relatively under-the-rader three-star recruit who was expected to serve as a complementary piece (alongside Ulysses Bentley) to Zach Evans in the Ole Miss backfield, but as Evans worked through his annual string of injuries, an early split backfield (Judkins had 43 carries to Evans’ 49 through three weeks) morphed into Judkins in a workhorse role with Evans providing breather-back touches (Judkins out-carried him 128 to 44 in the last five weeks of the season). While Evans produced at his typical elite clip on a per-carry basis, Judkins weathered heavy volume and posted quality team-relative efficiency numbers anyway, as his Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating of 117.0% lands in the 72nd percentile among all college runners in the last five years.

Judkins’ numbers are especially impressive in context. BAE Rating is itself a context-laden metric, but as a team-relative statistic, it’s necessarily influenced by the performance of the other backs operating within the same offensive environment as the player in question, a group in this case that was made up of Evans, a five-star player whose college career -- while underwhelming in the production department -- was never marked by anything but elite efficiency, and Bentley, a former 900-yard rushing lead back at SMU. This was a nice backfield whose non-Judkins backs collectively averaged a (weighted by carries) 4.60-star rating as high school recruits, a mark that lands in the 96th percentile among teammates of eventual NFL draftees and in the 99th percentile among teammates of college runners in general. Considering that elite in-house competition, Judkins’ quality BAE Rating looks even better: there have only been five amateur backs in the last five years who’ve carried the ball at least 200 times on teams with at least four-star backields, and Judkins’ mark in that metric ranks second among them, lower than only Najee Harris in 2020:

In addition to posting the second-highest BAE Rating while competing with the most highly-touted running back room in this group, Judkins is also notable here given the fact that he posted such numbers as a true freshman -- Harris was a senior, Cam Akers was a junior, Brian Robinson was a fifth-year guy, and JK Dobbins was a sophomore.

Judkins was less impressive from a consistency standpoint, as his -2.2% Relative Success Rate is a 41st-percentile mark that indicates he was producing positive outcomes on his attempts at a lower rate than were the collective other backs at Mississippi. I don’t necessarily need my freshman studs to perform well in both BAE Rating and RSR as long as they’re offering indications of competence via quality marks in one of them, but I also think that Judkins’ sup-par results in the latter metric could be symptomatic of a lack of physical development rather than evidence of any troubling deficiency he has from a cerebral standpoint.

In the same way that a lack of play strength contributed to the negative RSR marks posted by 2023 draft class backs such as Jahmyr Gibbs, Deuce Vaughn, and Israel Abanikanda, I think some of Judkins’ inconsistencies can be attributed to his own failure to fight away from contact near the line of scrimmage. He’s not universally bad in that area, but he was successfully brought down without gaining extra yardage on 100% of body-to-body, from-the-side tackle attempts from defensive linemen in the sample of games that I watched, and his overall rate of powering through contact from that position group is the third-lowest (ahead of only Vaughn and Chase Brown) among 20 backs for whom I’ve charted a significant amount of runs so far.

Judkins was similarly unimpressive against defensive backs, but he experienced much more success against linebackers, as his overall through-contact score versus those players is 0.16, slightly higher than the population average of 0.12. Overall, his through-contact splits against the three defensive position groups look a bit like those belonging to Abanikanda and Devon Achane, guys who also did solid damage against backers while going down relatively easily on tackle attempts from both linemen and DBs:

With Abanikanda and Achane, I perceived that such disparity in success versus different positions came from a need to get up to speed in order to generate power combined with a tunnel-vision focus on getting north-south in the open field. These guys aren’t LeSean McCoy-style dancers or Chris Carson-style brawlers with the ball in their hands, and I see some of the same effect in Judkins’ game. The good news with him is that he performed thusly as an 18- and 19-year old freshman in the best conference in the country, and while he was already listed at 5’11 and 210 pounds last season, more time in an SEC weight room should lend him more functional power -- and therefore greater consistency -- as a ball-carrier. As a result, I expect some of these relative weaknesses to correct themselves through Judkins’ natural maturation process.

I said earlier that Judkins’ sup-par results in RSR could be symptomatic of a lack of physical development rather than of cerebral deficiencies, and I feel that way because he’s already pretty good in most of the cerebral areas that I evaluate through my charting process. From a vision standpoint, Judkins is fairly passive, as his rate of neutrally-graded plays is significantly higher than the population average on both zone and gap concepts, but he’s a pretty clean decision-maker overall. Notably, his decisiveness, patience, and tracking each graded out positively on both zone and gap runs: he paces well behind pullers, presses to the line of scrimmage effectively, commits to open lanes quickly, and navigates through congestion with impressive composure and spatial awareness.

That decisiveness is probably Judkins’ best soft skill at this point in his development, as it allows him to explode into the second level for chunk gains as well as maximize yardage available on lower-ceiling runs necessary to keep drives alive. Both sides of that coin can be seen in this mini-compilation:

That first play is one on which many young backs would carry wide with the goal of gaining the edge and creating a big gain, but Judkins wisely -- and quickly -- identifies that getting north/south is the best option, and he’s able to align himself vertically without overrunning the crease that allows him to pick up a first down (though I would like to see a sharper transition from lateral to vertical movement with his feet).

On the second play, Judkins immediately commits to the edge and gets a first down on a duo run that could have easily been swallowed up in the backfield by defensive pressure.

On the third play, Judkins’ tracking pairs with his decisiveness to allow for a chunk gain through a tight and uneven crease that he navigated way too easily given the level of difficulty presented by the circumstances. The second angle of the run shows the ridiculousness of the play: Judkins explodes north/south before the clear-out block even hits, slaloming around the heels of that blocker while also barely allowing the crashing linebacker to get a hand on him.

Judkins also exhibited flashes of ability to bait and manipulate defenders out of position, particularly in the Kentucky game. This play is a good example: he presses toward the interior congestion in order to draw the edge defender inside before back-cutting to the outside and diving forward for a short first down.

Overall, I came away from this film study more impressed with Judkins than I was by Singleton, and considering that Sanders was a sophomore last season, grading on a curve probably puts Judkins ahead of him as a pure runner as well. Judkins doesn’t have the receiving chops that Sanders has exhibited to date, and he also probably isn’t quite the explosive athlete that Singleton is (though he’s plenty fast), but he’s already an incredibly clean decision-maker who has the potential to be really good by the time he declares for the NFL Draft. A couple years in an SEC weight room will help him shed tacklers and churn out positive outcomes on a higher percentage of his carries, and I also wouldn’t be surprised to see him become a more creative runner (in terms of lane selection on zone concepts and manipulation of defenders on gap concepts) as he continues gaining experience. I won’t do it yet, but I’m tempted to slide him ahead of Singleton in my devy rankings.