Roschon Johnson did not test like the athletic freak that many thought he might have been this offseason, but it wasn’t all bad for him at the NFL Combine:

At 219 pounds, Johnson was the third-heaviest running back in Indianapolis, but the 225 he weighed at Texas’ Pro Day ties for him the second spot in this year’s class, even with Tiyon Evans and behind just Tavion Thomas.

Prior to putting on those six extra pounds, Johnson was a little underwhelming in his athletic testing, but historical prospects with similar combinations of size and movement skills have frequently been solid NFL contributors. The following are the players whose physical profiles comp most cleanly to Johnson’s:

Size is as much a differentiator for running backs in the NFL as it is for heterosexual men on dating apps (while the average weight among backs who carried the ball in an NFL game was 214 pounds last season, the average rush attempt was handled by a 219-pound player; similarly, while the average height among male Tinder users was 5’10 last year, the average Tinder date involved a man standing 6’1), but even among big runners, we’d like to see some semblance of functional athleticism that suggests a player will be able to carry their on-field success over from college to the NFL.

Sometimes, as in the case of Tyler Allgeier, that just means being a relatively well-rounded mover even if none of your traits are individually special -- in other words, just don’t have massive weaknesses. In other cases, as with Le’Veon Bell’s lateral agility or Derrius Guice’s top-end speed, that means supplementing weaknesses with one high-level, meal-ticket trait.

With subpar marks in all but the 10-yard split and the broad jump (where his numbers still aren’t elite), Johnson sort of straddles that line, but the most important thing is identifying the ways in which a player will be able to win in the NFL. To that end, it helps to examine how a back’s skillset manifests itself on the field analytically, in terms of both the quality and the shape of his rushing efficiency profile:

While running 4.42 in the forty would have made Johnson a more exciting prospect, it’s not as if he’s a big-time breakaway runner who depends on long speed for his production. In the context of his unique skillset (and the roles made available to him by that skillset), it matters far less that Johnson runs a 4.58 than it would for, say, Jahmyr Gibbs.

Instead of open-field prowess, Johnson possesses elite tackle-breaking skills and the ability to produce positive outcomes on a consistent, down-to-down basis even while facing relatively heavy defensive fronts. For a player like that, strength and short-area burst are more useful than speed, so Johnson’s best athletic traits -- even if they’re not amazing -- make sense in the context of what his on-field metrics say about the kinds of ways in which he earns yardage. That’s good.

What’s also good is Johnson’s career mark in Relative Success Rate. The 75th percentile isn’t an elite threshold, but the circumstances surrounding Johnson’s performance in this area are important: obviously, he played much of his career alongside a back widely considered a generational talent in Bijan Robinson. It’s often faulty process to excuse a player’s lack of team-relative efficiency because of the perceived talent-level of a particular teammate, but we don’t have to do that here. First, Johnson never posted a negative (or even sub-50th-percentile) RSR at Texas, so there’s not much to excuse here, and second, we can account for the talent-level of Johnson’s backfield mates without haggling, hemming, or hawing over how much weight to give to whatever impact that Bijan may have had on his numbers.

Bijan Robinson is the standout, but most of the rest of Roschon Johnson’s backfield mates at Texas were highly-touted high school recruits as well.

Collectively, the non-Johnson running backs during his time at Texas averaged a 4.37-star rating as high school recruits, making them a 94th-percentile group among teammates of running backs drafted since 2007. Bijan came out of high school as a 5-star, but Keaontay Ingram, Jonathan Brooks, Keilan Robinson, and Jaydon Blue were all 4-star recruits who made double- and/or triple-digit carry contributions for the Longhorns between 2019 and 2022.

Box count data has only been around for college players since the 2018 season, but among backs drafted since then, only six guys have entered the league with RSR marks above the 50th-percentile posted while playing with teammates who averaged at least a 4-star rating as recruits: Cam Akers, Najee Harris, Zamir White, Brian Robinson, Josh Jacobs, and Dameon Pierce. If we constrict our thresholds to include only backs with RSR marks above the 66th-percentile, we’re left with just White, Robinson, Jacobs, and Pierce.

White didn’t do much in his rookie season, but Robinson, Jacobs, and Pierce all stepped into starting jobs right from the jump (as did Akers and Harris), and I don’t believe that’s a coincidence. Much is made of explosive run rate and rushing yards over expected and other measures of per-carry efficiency -- and for good reason -- but for many NFL offenses, staying on schedule is still the name of the game, and I can’t think of a better case a back could make for himself as a value-add in that area than playing in a stacked college backfield with the best running back prospect we’ve seen since Saquon Barkley and still proving to be the most consistent and dependable ball-carrier on the team, something Johnson did to no small degree.

Where Johnson would benefit from some excuses is pretty much everywhere else. He did post a 114.8% Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating last season, the first in his career above the 100% mark, but even that would be well-below average (35th percentile) if it were his career total. I noted above that he’s not a big-play runner, which is not necessarily a bad thing stylistically, but Johnson is not one of these guys (like Pierce or Jacobs) who maintains a high degree of team-relative efficiency despite not causing much damage in the open field. For Johnson, the lack of chunk and breakaway gains caps per-carry efficiency, which is bad.

In that sense, Johnson is a lot like Brian Robinson, and based on similarity scores generated using the physical measurables of players in tandem with their rushing efficiency profiles, it’s Robinson who scores out as the cleanest point of comparison for Johnson:

Under the microscope:

With their 10-yard splits (1.54 to 15.3) and Flying 20s (1.92 to 1.90) separated by a combined three one-hundredths of a second, I think Johnson and Robinson have closer speed profiles than their raw 40-times would indicate, and their efficiency numbers are nearly identical regardless.

If Johnson is going to secure a fantasy-relevant NFL role, it will likely be in the Brian Robinson mold as an inside grinder with three-down utility paired with a more juiced-up athlete capable of making things happen out in space. To that end, I also think Johnson’s positional versatility and willingness to do the dirty work and contribute in small ways makes him a better candidate for NFL rostership than many other backs with his production and efficiency profiles. Johnson owns the highest career PFF pass-blocking grade among Power Five runners in this class, he caught 23 passes as a true freshman and posted 74th-percentile or better Route Diversity in every season of his career, he contributed as both a returner and a coverage guy on special teams (he averaged over eight special teams coverage snaps per game as a senior, and his seven career tackles are second-most among 2023 backs), and he came to Texas as a 4-star dual-threat quarterback.

He’s not a smash bet as a potential fantasy asset, but on top of the reliable committee back role that he seems well-suited for, all the above factors combine to give Johnson some fun avenues to success as an NFL player. If there’s ever going to be another Taysom Hill, Roschon feels like as good a candidate as any.