We’re about three quarters of the way through the 2023 season and at a point at which more than a dozen rookie running backs have had at least 20 opportunities to run the ball. It does not so far look like the legendary class that we were promised back in 2020 and 2021, but I’d say this year’s crop of runners has at least been solid. The most productive of them currently sit at second, eighth, and 18th in PPR points per game, while at least six others have offered lineup-worthy fantasy utility at some point in the season.

In this article, I want to assess the level of play of each of those rookie backs independent of their fantasy output. In order of total rushing attempts, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way up:

Deuce Vaughn has touched the ball only twice since handling it 25 times over the first five weeks of the season, and perhaps for good reason:

He has just one run of greater than five yards across his 21 total attempts, and as indicated above, he has forced zero missed tackles as a ball-carrier (whether rushing or receiving). Unfortunately, these things aren’t necessarily a surprise.

Vaughn finished out his college career by posting Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Relative Success Rate marks in the 5th and 1st percentiles, respectively, during a 293-carry junior season. On a 91-carry sample from 2021 and 2022, he charted out as the single least powerful and as the fourth-least elusive runner among 25 backs from whom I’ve watched a qualifying amount of film on. Neither his on-field results nor his tape from Kansas State should have planted expectations of rushing viability at the NFL level from Vaughn in our brains.

It’s also true, however, that Vaughn’s usage is not doing him any favors. Out of more than 80 league-wide backs with at least 20 rushing attempts on the season -- as you can filter for and find on our brand new NFL data dashboard -- Vaughn has seen heavier defensive fronts than all but six of them: Jordan Mason, Derrick Henry, Cam Akers, Gus Edwards, Jamaal Williams, and Damien Harris. It’s also not as if defenses are stacking the box in response to Vaughn specifically. Tony Pollard and Rico Dowdle have seen much lighter defensive fronts -- 7.01 and 7.02 defenders on average, respectively, compared to Vaughn’s 7.43 -- but they’ve also played with much lighter personnel. While an average of 1.41 tight ends have been on the field for both Pollard and Dowdle’s rushing attempts (a mark right at the league average), Vaughn has been sent out to carry the ball with an average of 1.81 tight ends in formation, the third-most most in the NFL behind only Williams and Tank Bigsby (15 of his 21 carries have come with multiple tight ends on the field!). For whatever reason, Mike McCarthy and the offensive staff in Dallas have decided that heavy formations into stacked defensive fronts provide just the right circumstances for deploying a 5’5 and 179-pound running back who did not see even seven box defenders on his average rushing attempt in college.

Vaughn’s responsibilities in the receiving game are not where they need to be, either. His trump card as a prospect should have been his elite versatility as a route-runner, but the Cowboys are not making use of those skills. Vaughn has been tasked with running just 18 routes all season, and while he’s done enough to post solid per-route and per-target yardage numbers as is, just 25% of those routes and just one of his six targets have come on something other than a screen or a checkdown, and he’s lined up out wide or in the slot just three times. Dowdle has been a quality backup to Pollard and Vaughn’s size is probably a deterrent to his getting on the field even for receiving work (at least indirectly, insofar as it’s a barrier to holding up in pass-protection), but even when he is getting opportunities, they’re simply not coming in forms that take advantage of what Vaughn does well.

Kendre Miller has also been a bummer:

Nobody on the Saints is doing much on the ground this season, but I don’t think you can completely blame a bad situation in Miller’s case. He has seen the lightest defensive fronts of any runner on the team, but he has the lowest per-carry average and the second-lowest success rate of all the Saints’ running backs. He seems to be making things hard on himself: the other New Orleans runners have collectively averaged 1.22 yards before contact per attempt (a mark that would put them a bit above the league mean), while Miller’s average of 0.14 ranks sixth-lowest in the NFL. The dynamic between Miller’s having the lightest boxes but also the fewest yards before contact of any runner on the team illustrates how the latter is just as much a “running back stat” as it is an “offensive line stat”.

Such a thing was not a problem for Miller in college, as the 2.86 yards before contact he averaged over his three years at TCU would rank sixth among Power Five runners with at least 100 attempts this season. Still, his running style struck me as something that would be difficult to successfully duplicate in the NFL, and at least so far, things are going as expected, with poor per-carry output next to quality through-contract metrics offered in consolation.

Unlike Vaughn, Keaton Mitchell is an undersized rookie running back who has been used in ways that take advantage of what he does well:

Mitchell has run the ball with more than one tight end on the field just once all season, and only four of his 29 rushing attempts have come with more than seven players near the line of scrimmage. It’s been relatively easy to produce at an efficient clip in the Baltimore backfield in the last few years, and both Justice Hill and Gus Edwards join Mitchell among the 24 league-wide backs who are averaging more than 1.5 yards before contact on a per-attempt basis. Given those factors, it should be no surprise that Mitchell is chewing up yardage in the open field, as he’s built to take advantage of wide open running lanes like few other players in the league. He’s very quick, he’s very fast, and he left East Carolina with career marks in Chunk Rate+ and Breakaway Conversion Rate that each land above the 90th percentile. Mitchell’s efficiency surprises me less than his consistency and through-contact success do, but as is apparent this season perhaps more than at any time since Chris Johnson’s prime, fast rb go brrr.

Chris Rodriguez Jr. has also been good on his 31 carries, more than half of which have come in the last three weeks:

It’s on a relatively small sample, but Rodriguez has been the most effective runner in the Washington backfield this season. The short- and long-term upside is probably capped here given that Brian Robinson Jr. has proven to be a capable NFL starter, has some skill-set overlap with Rodriguez, and is under contract for another two years, but Antonio Gibson is about to be a free agent. Rodriguez entered the league with an excellent efficiency profile, has been good on his opportunities so far as a rookie, and is dirt cheap in dynasty.

Tank Bigsby is somehow not dirt cheap:

Bigsby’s average of 0.17 yards before contact per attempt is right next to Miller’s at seventh-lowest on the league leaderboard, but I think we can blame situational factors a bit more in his case. For one, both D’Ernest Johnson and Travis Etienne rank outside the league’s top-60 backs in the same metric, with a collective 0.95 average. Second, Bigsby has carried the ball against easily the heaviest defensive fronts on the team and in the second-heaviest personnel groupings of any runner in the league. BAE Rating accounts for much of the effect of the former and he is not performing well in that metric, but Bigsby is churning out positive outcomes at a decent rate despite running behind Pro Football Focus’ 31st-ranked run-blocking offensive line.

I think the hate has gone a bit too far on Bigsby. Johnson is a better player and deserves to have usurped him on the depth chart, but the rookie has run into some of the least advantageous circumstances of any back in the league and has done some positive things anyway. For whatever it’s worth, his Success Rate on nine short-yardage attempts (three or fewer yards to go) into heavy defensive fronts (8+ men) is the fifth-highest among 66 league-wide runners with at least five such rushes.

Jaleel McLaughlin has been the biggest revelation in this rookie class:

With just 52 yards on 22 touches since mid-November, McLaughlin may have hit a bit of a rookie wall in his transition from Youngstown State at the FCS level to lining up against the Buffalo Bills, but his aggregate numbers are still among the best in the league. Development in pass-protection will probably be important for his long-term production potential, as McLaughlin has played in mostly long down-and-distance situations but also earned the lowest PFF pass-blocking grade among 44 backs with at least 20 targets this season.

Emari Demercado is the quintessential JAG:

He’s not super efficient, but he’s also not actively hurting them out there, and while he can play on all three downs and make the occasional man miss on the way to another four-yard gain, Demercado is not a guy whose play leaves you wanting more. He’s aggressively average, to the extent that even the Cardinals couldn’t figure out if they wanted him serving as the caretaker of their James Conner-less backfield during the earlier mid-season stretch in which they played Demercado on 77%, 45%, 79%, and 52% of the snaps in four consecutive games.

Roschon Johnson’s efficiency profile is perhaps the most surprising of any running back in this group:

Johnson’s whole thing in college was breaking tackles. He forced 0.35 missed tackles and gained 3.99 yards after contact per attempt during his four years at Texas, marks that would both rank inside the top ten among Power Five backs with at least 100 carries in 2023. Is it good or bad that he’s now not making things happen through contact if he’s still been able to add some value on the ground?

I think it might be good. It’s nice to see that -- even while running into relatively heavy defensive fronts -- Johnson hasn’t needed to fight away from a bunch of tacklers to ensure positive per-carry output, and it’s encouraging for his development to see such an important element of his running style begin to manifest itself in recent weeks. Johnson had forced just two missed tackles on 33 attempts through the Saints game back in week nine, but in the three games since, he has forced seven on just 22 rushes. Time will tell if such things are a sign of progress or just the latest example of splits-based analysis gone awry.

De’Von Achane was performing like the best runner in the league at the time I published this midseason efficiency check-in article back in October, and he’s still there now:

I would imagine that we’ll see more of the 17-for-73 type performance that Achane just posted against Washington going forward than the 11-for-151s he was putting up pre-injury, but that’s just because nobody can sustainably average double-digit yardage on double-digit carries like Achane was doing earlier this season.

I will preface this theory by saying that I am a big Achane Kool-Aid drinker, but I also think you can spin his injury absences positively: it seems like Mike McDaniel has erred on the side of caution in his approach to Achane’s ailments, something that would portend good rather than bad things for Achane’s future health and availability despite the combination of inconvenience and injury pronophobia that his missed games have imposed upon fantasy gamers.

If this article is anything, it’s a can-these-guys-play? sniff test, and early returns say “yes” on Tyjae Spears:

He’s averaging nearly five yards per carry behind an average offensive line and while running into defensive fronts that are heavier than those seen by Alvin Kamara, Tony Pollard, and Najee Harris, he’s making guys miss at one of the highest rates in the NFL, and he’s churning out positive outcomes with more regularity than is Derrick Henry. Henry is a free agent this offseason and Spears is capable of three-down work.

I’m not sure how long we have to wait until we simply declare Zach Charbonnet to be better than Kenneth Walker, but he was playing like it back in October and is still playing like it now.

Walker has turned five of his eight chunk runs into breakaway gains of 20+ yards, but Charbonnet is both succeeding on a higher percentage of his carries and creating explosive plays more often than the bounce-happy Walker is so far this season.He’s averaging just 3.21 yards per carry in a workhorse role over the last three weeks, but I think we can attribute those recent struggles to a string of tough rushing defenses (the Rams, 49ers, and Cowboys each rank in the top ten according to PFF).

We now have more than a 100-carry sample from Jahmyr Gibbs:

This is exactly the same guy we saw in college. Gibbs finished his amateur career with a 106.2% BAE Rating and a -3.6% RSR posted against incredibly light defensive fronts (his career 6.23 average would be the fourth-lowest mark among Power Five backs with 100+ attempts this season), and his above numbers have been posted against an average of 6.73 defenders in the box, good for the second-lightest fronts seen by any 100+ carry runner in the NFL this season (heavier than only Kyren Williams’). With marks above the 75th percentile in each of Chunk Rate, Chunk Rate+, and Breakaway Conversion Rate, it’s clear that Gibbs is an explosive player capable of making things happen in the open field, but his positive RYOE rate is the fourth-lowest among all qualifying runners. He’s an all-or-nothing kind of guy (though playing behind Detroit’s excellent offensive line means his raw Success Rate numbers look completely fine).

Finally, Bijan Robinson also looks like a seamless projection:

Robinson finished his college career with a 114.2% BAE Rating and a -0.5% RSR, and it makes sense to me that a player whose rarest traits are athletic and who was a spotty zone decision-maker at Texas (he ranks sixth in rate of negatively graded zone plays out of 29 backs for whom I’ve charted a significant number of runs) is now succeeding on fewer of his attempts in a zone-heavy scheme than are a set of veteran teammates at the same time that his team-relative efficiency has increased since having played last season with a duo of Roschon Johnson and Jonathon Brooks that is probably more talented than the Tyler Allgeier and Cordarrelle Patterson combination that he now shares a backfield with in the NFL. Bijan is clearly as advertised and has been a value-adding ball-carrier from pretty much angle.