I’m not completely sure in what format and from what angle, but as I (mostly) leave behind rookie analysis and pivot to more generally dynasty-focused content this summer, I also want to stay in the player evaluation game and keep my eyes looking forward by churning out a devy-centric article every week or so. That will help me (and you) in several ways: one, my devy rankings will just be plain better, two, my 2024 rookie rankings will be better for my having been thinking about and getting familiar with these players for going on a year rather than cramming before the Draft (like preparing for the launch of this website largely forced me to do this offseason), and three, I’ll have a better grasp of the running back landscape across both dynasty and devy formats and will be more equipped to offer trade and valuation advice between future picks and current NFL assets as a result. To those ends, what better place to start than at the top?

The current state of my devy rankings is almost exclusively formulated using the various data points that I’ve come to rely on for my personal running back evaluations, and by those numbers, there’s really no other option for me at RB1 than Raheim Sanders. That’s not necessarily a hot take, but it also doesn’t align exactly with consensus: the guys over at campus2canton.com just released their 2023 Devy Guide, a fantastic publication containing strategy pieces, research articles, advanced metrics, film evaluations, and over 256 players ranked and tiered, and while they have Sanders in their first tier of running backs, he’s their RB3. He occupies the same spot according to the devy ADP listed on their site, and guys like Nick Singleton, TreVeyon Henderson, and Quinshon Judkins are generally right there with him in contention for the top spot in the minds of most devy enthusiasts.

Quinshon Judkins is an elite devy asset after he rushed for nearly 1600 yards in the SEC as a true freshman.

I reserve the right to change my mind later, but I wanted to explore Sanders’ profile and express what puts him over those guys (as well as over every other running back in college football) for me as things stand right now.

To start, Sanders checks all the base requirement boxes that we want to see from our running back prospects: he’s big, he’s relatively athletic, he contributes well in the passing game, he runs efficiently on the ground, and he’s been productive in the best conference in the country.

That first point is obvious. Sanders came out of high school standing 6’2 and weighing 210 pounds, a 72nd-percentile number on the scale that made him a near-guarantee to have workhorse size by the time he reached the NFL, and checking that box became a foregone conclusion as soon as his freshman season at Arkansas. In that 2020 season, he was 225 before being listed at 227 last year, and on the current spring roster, Sanders is listed at a beefy 237. Based on historical weight gain patterns, such seasonal measurements indicate that Sanders is likely to be 6’1 ⅜” and 233.5 pounds at next year’s Combine (assuming he declares). Those measurements would make him a similarly constructed player to past prospects like Najee Harris, James Conner, Jeremy Hill, and Beanie Wells.

Ohio State legend and 1000-yard NFL rusher Beanie Wells was built similarly to Raheim Sanders.

For comparison, Singleton, Henderson, and Judkins are currently listed at 228, 214, and 210, respectively, and have yearly measurement patterns that make them likely to weigh 226, 215, and 215, respectively, at their eventual Combines. None of them have size issues, per se, but the likelihood that Sanders (and the same applies to Singleton) comes in “too” light during his pre-Draft process is far smaller than the chance that Henderson or Judkins end up being in the slightly-undersized category at somewhere in the 207-212 range. If we’re betting on workhorse outcomes, Sanders is relatively safe in this regard (and, if anything, we’d probably rather he be in the 220-230 range than pushing 240).

As an athlete, Sanders probably isn’t elite, but it doesn’t seem like he has large deficiencies in this area, either. The Athletic Comparison Tool over at campus2canton.com has Jim Brown (!!), Steven Jackson, and Latavius Murray among his ten most similar players, and at 233 projected pounds, he can have 37th-percentile speed (at 4.57 in the forty-yard dash) and still hit the 106.0 threshold that the Speed Score cultists hold up as the standard for RB1-level production.

Especially given his size, the thing that makes Sanders both unique and a particularly interesting candidate for devy RB1 is his ability to contribute in the passing game. He was recruited as an Athlete after spending a lot of time at wide receiver in high school, he caught 28 passes in 13 games last year, and he’s posted 74th-percentile-or-better Route Diversity in both of his two collegiate seasons. Further evidence of his versatility comes via the 15% of passing snaps that he spent either in the slot or out wide last season, an 80th-percentile mark that exceeds the rate at which Alvin Kamara lined up somewhere other than the backfield during his career at Tennessee, and Sanders’ 95% True Catch Rate and 9.8 YAC per reception marks (in the 84th and 61st percentiles, respectively) indicate that he has soft hands and a solid ability to make things happen out in space.

To again compare Sanders to those other tier-one devy runners: Singleton caught just 11 passes at 7.7 yards per reception (a 22nd-percentile average) last season, Henderson hauled in just 7 balls for 28 yards during an injury-slowed 2022 campaign after posting 312 yards on 27 receptions’ worth of mostly dumpoff-fueled receiving work in 2021 (his Route Diversity was in the 24th percentile and 75% of his total route tree was made up of basic, checkdown-type pass patterns), while Judkins’ freshman year sort of split the difference between those two profiles at 15-for-132 on 16th-percentile Route Diversity. Sanders isn’t Christian McCaffrey out there, but the numbers indicate that he’s well ahead of these other three backs in his pass-catching development.

As a runner, Sanders was decent (at least for a first-time full-time running back against premier competition) as a freshman and dominant last season:

For reference, the 91st-percentile mark that Sanders posted in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating last season indicates that he was outperforming a group of backfield teammates that collectively averaged a 3.41-star rating as high school recruits (a 61st-percentile mark among teammates of backs drafted since 2007) to a similar (and slightly greater) degree to which guys like Kenneth Walker and Devon Achane outperformed their own teammates in college (146.1% and 145.6%, respectively), and that 4.4% mark in Relative Success Rate lands in the 61st-percentile and is in the same range as what guys like Najee Harris and Travis Etienne posted as amateurs (4.3% and 4.1%, respectively). In short, Sanders was a dominant runner on a per-touch basis with high volume in the SEC, and the best-season marks for our other three RB1 contenders -- while good -- are largely not in the same ballpark:

Those guys were all freshman when they posted the above numbers, and while it’s true that Sanders’ first-season marks weren’t great, he posted what he posted last season and I’d rather bank on a guy who already turned it around to produce high-end per-carry output than hope that another guy can figure things out in the same way.

The most impressive part of Sanders’ rushing profile to me is the RSR he posted last season. It’d be reasonable to expect growing pains in the behind-the-line-of-scrimmage decision-making category from a converted wide receiver, but Sanders came on the scene already producing positive outcomes at a higher rate than his teammates as a freshman and then doubled down on that consistent output by being objectively impressive in that area as a sophomore.

To the same point: I want to save most of my film charting for games from players’ final college seasons, but to get a sense of Sanders’ strengths, weaknesses, and overall style as a runner, I went ahead and charted his 24-for-156 performance against South Carolina from last September and came away impressed with how clean he was from a cerebral standpoint. It’s just one game, but on mostly zone runs (Pro Football Focus charted 184 of his 224 carries from last season as having come on zone concepts) that require him to make actual decisions in the backfield, he earned one negative grade in the decisiveness category but either positive or neutral grades in every category on all other attempts. In all, his performance in that game produced a yet-unreliable aggregate score of 0.76 on zone concepts that -- if the sample was large enough to qualify -- would rank fifth among the sixteen runners that I’ve studied from the 2023 class. I was particularly impressed by his ability to manipulate defenders in and out of holes in order to create lanes beyond what his offensive line had blocked, a skill that strikes me as advanced for a player who is relatively new to the position. If that’s something that he simply has a natural instinct for, all the better.

From a physically stylistic standpoint, I also came away impressed with Sanders’ elusiveness but was caught off guard by an apparent lack of power. He didn’t gain extra yards (let alone break) through much contact outside of reaches and arm-tackle attempts, and he’s not a guy who strikes me as having much dawg in his game as a runner (that’s not to say that he lacks grit or determination, etc., just that his running style doesn’t exude those things in the way you’d expect out of a 230-pound beast, at least in the one game I’ve watched closely so far). His ability to sense movement in his periphery and throw dead legs, spin moves, and back cuts in order to minimize contact and evade would-be tacklers was very nice for a player of his size, however, and reminded me of the same skills in Najee Harris.

As a big back with nimble feet and receiving chops, Raheim Sanders has some shades of Najee Harris to his game.

Perhaps most importantly, though (at least in terms of projecting draft capital), Sanders was super productive as a sophomore in the best conference in the country. His 1443 rushing yards were second in the SEC to Judkins’ 1567 (and well ahead of Devon Achane’s third-place 1102), and a composite score generated using Sanders’ 26.2% Dominator Rating in combination with the offensive and overall S&P+ ratings of his Razorbacks squad indicates that Sanders produced at a 90th-percentile level in 2022 relative to all sophomore backs since 2009 (for reference, guys like Le’Veon Bell, Bijan Robinson, and Breece Hall scored in the 88th, 89th, and 92nd percentiles, respectively, during their own sophomore seasons). Through two years, Sanders’ production profile most closely matches with the averages of runners who’ve gone on to be selected in the second round of the NFL Draft in that time-frame.

If he can secure that sort of capital, Sanders will be a workhorse-sized, full skill-set back with a strong history of production, the same sort of day two prospect that Bell and Hall -- as well as eventual RB1-level producers like Eddie Lacy, Joe Mixon, and Matt Forte, among others -- found themselves to be. In that event, he’ll be well worth selecting at the 1.01 in dynasty rookie drafts and retrospectively deserving of the RB1 spot I currently have him at in my devy rankings. It’s not a foregone conclusion, but the path is clear.