I haven’t written about Tank Bigsby since launch day, but I had an interesting chat with Cody Carpentier about him a few weeks ago and have recently been moving him up and down my rookie rankings as I attempt to wrap my head around his profile, and I think it’s time to dedicate some focused thought to his potential as a three-down contributor.

At the same time that his rushing efficiency numbers dropped off after a stellar freshman season, Bigsby’s receiving totals steadily increased from 11 to 21 to 30, putting his junior season figure above most reasonable thresholds and giving him a pretty nice receiving profile from a volume standpoint:

The volume hounds are fully bought into Bigsby’s destiny as the next Roger Craig on the strength of those three numbers alone, but a closer look at his on-field impact as a pass-catcher doesn’t allow for such unbridled enthusiasm:

We know that Bigsby can make things happen with the ball in his hands (he forced 0.29 missed tackles per attempt, an 86th-percentile mark), so that YAC per reception mark makes sense, but outside of it, his efficiency profile is of a kind that can only be bailed out by a bunch of uncatchable targets artificially deflating the numbers. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.

Unlike guys like Bijan Robinson, Tyjae Spears, Roschon Johnson, and Deuce Vaughn whose sub-75% raw catch rates bely pass-catching ability that is more accurately represented by True Catch Rates above the 88% mark, Bigsby’s 26th-percentile raw number is actually slightly more impressive than his 83.8% TCR that lands in the 20th percentile and in the same range as the marks of players like Kenneth Walker, Miles Sanders, and Zach Evans. Given that Bigsby’s failure to consistently catch the ball seems to not have been circumstantially driven, the same logic would apply to his even less impressive mark in yards per target. His yards per reception total is abysmal no matter how you slice things, and at this point, we’re probably hoping for dump-off funnel-type outcomes in the Leonard Fournette mold rather than the dynamic, Aaron Jones- or Tony Pollard-type contributions that Bigsby’s quality volume numbers suggest theoretical (though still speculative) access to.

Our mixed bag of pretty good and pretty bad on Bigsby’s third-down resumé continues in his usage profile:

I like my running backs to exhibit alignment versatility in college, so such a high rate of snaps taken in the slot and out wide would normally be encouraging, but when considered alongside his Benjamin Button aDOT, Bigsby lining up out wide feels more like window dressing than it does like evidence of legitimate versatility. He hovered around the CFB-wide average for basic, checkdown-type routes as a portion of his overall route inventory in each of his three seasons at Auburn.

Despite that, Bigsby grew during his career into a varied route runner, cresting the 94th percentile in Route Diversity as a junior, with out, angle, and wheel routes -- downfield routes that carry some of the highest per-route yardage values on the running back tree -- representing some of his most high-volume pass patterns.

The key to sussing out which of these seemingly-paradoxical metrics -- his high rate of basic routes and his varied repertoire -- more accurately represents Bigsby’s ability as a route-runner may be found in his RATE stats. By that measure, Bigsby looks like a checkdown hero Make-a-Wish kid who was allowed to live out his dream of being a wide receiver by running wheel routes and lining up outside in situations where -- let’s be honest -- he wasn’t actually going to get the ball. That trend was consistent throughout Bigsby’s career, as his yearly RATE marks on all routes -- as well as basic and advanced routes specifically -- were as follows:

So, despite running increasingly varied pass patterns that included some of the highest-value routes on the running back tree, Bigsby was never targeted even close to the CFB-wide average on a per-route basis, especially on those advanced route types and even on dump-offs.

To be fair, however, Bigsby spent his entire college career playing on mediocre offenses (Auburn never ranked higher than 68th in the country in points per game during Bigsby’s time) led by mobile quarterbacks in Bo Nix and Robby Ashford who collectively averaged nearly 10 rushing attempts per game, cutting significantly into Bigsby’s checkdown opportunities. Such a feature affecting Bigsby’s per-route target rates could also have resulted in the targets he did receive more frequently coming in worse-case-scenario circumstances than the targets generally directed at backs on other teams -- if Nix and Ashford are taking off and running rather than checking the ball down, then the times when Bigsby was actually getting the ball dumped off to him may have just been in the situations where the offense was especially fucked. Such a selection process could hypothetically result in low RATE numbers and low per-target and per-catch efficiency numbers that Bigsby bears little responsibility for.

The most charitable view of Tank Bigsby’s receiving skills probably involves blaming Bo Nix for his low efficiency and inability to earn targets.

I’m not confident that that’s what actually happened here, but if you’re buying into Bigsby as a potential three-down contributor, I think that’s the version of the story you have to tell yourself. The alternative is that he was a fraudulently-versatile receiver who didn’t actually command targets on his routes or produce efficiently with his opportunities, but whose volume numbers look decent via a mix of durability and baseline competence that enabled his running a ton of routes (his total routes run in the last two seasons land in the 92nd and 95th percentiles, respectively, among all college runners in the last five years) on bad teams.

I’d be more inclined to give Bigsby the full benefit of the doubt if he had simply caught more of the catchable balls thrown his direction, but I do think it’s probably true that his receiving numbers in a variety of categories suffered because of the environmental circumstances surrounding Bigsby in the Auburn offense. To me, Bigsby’s receiving profile looks like a knock-off version of those belonging to Devon Achane and Evan Hull: all three of those guys were heavy receiving contributors (Achane and Hull posted Target Shares of 14.7% and 16.8% last season) on bad offenses (out of 131 teams, Texas A&M and Northwestern ranked 101st and 128th in points per game in 2022) that likely put them in disadvantageous situations resulting in subpar per-reception numbers (8.5 for Achane and 9.0 for Hull, each below the 40th percentile).

Bigsby was probably affected by poor surrounding circumstances in similar ways to those backs, but even with a charitable view of his numbers, I think it’s more likely that Bigsby was square-pegged into a round hole as a versatile pass-catcher than it is that he was a secretly dynamic receiver being dragged down through no fault of his own. There’s developmental potential here given the advanced things he was tasked with from a route-running standpoint, but the vast majority of NFL teams will have a back they trust more with passing-down duties than Bigsby.