There are some players and corresponding landing spots in this rookie running back class that I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on: Bijan Robinson to the Falcons is easy, Jahmyr Gibbs replacing D’Andre Swift in Detroit is mostly straightforward, Zach Evans with some do-or-die opportunity behind Cam Akers in Los Angeles is crystal clear, and Roschon Johnson stepping into some version of the David Montgomery role in a revamped Chicago backfield makes sense. On the other end of the spectrum, though, are the players and situations for which I have as many questions as I do solid priors: Kendre Miller in New Orleans comes with a lot of moving parts, Tyjae Spears in Tennessee could either be the late-stage version of what Derrick Henry and Dion Lewis were supposed to be or the newest fool’s gold heir to a king that just won’t die, and Tank Bigsby joining Travis Etienne in Jacksonville would be much easier to project if I was confident in either my evaluation of Bigsby (I’m not) or my general thoughts on what Doug Pederson and his coaching staff wants to do with their backfield (I’m not).

As somebody probably once wrote on a bullshit stock graphic with some terrible font superimposed over an oversaturated picture of a beach sunset, though, the only thing worse than failing is not trying, and while we likely won’t uncover anything either profound or definitive regarding the distribution of work in this Jaguar running back room, I’m gonna throw a bunch of information at you, tell you what I think about it, and maybe stumble upon something insightful along the way.

There are currently six runners under some sort of contract with the Jaguars, and other than Qadree Ollison (who touched the ball zero times as a member of the Dallas Cowboys in 2022), here they are, listed in alphabetical order along with their carry totals and marks in my pet rushing efficiency metrics from last season:

Other than the travesty that was D’Ernest Johnson not getting more than four rushing attempts on a Cleveland team that was starved for running back utility behind Nick Chubb just one year removed from Johnson performing as one of the best breather backs in the league, the thing that stands out to me here is Etienne’s incredible efficiency as a pseudo-rookie on a pretty sizable workload in his first year back from a Lisfranc injury. Despite some Swift-esque what-the-fuck moments as a decision-maker behind the line of scrimmage, Etienne was awesome last year on aggregate, as he notched both the highest Relative Success Rate among all lead backs in the NFL and the highest Rushing Yards Over Expected per Carry average (0.73) among all 100+ attempt runners in the NFL, regardless of position.

Regarding Etienne’s performance in the team-relative metrics in the above table and of particular relevance to the topic of this article, it’s worth pointing out that the collective “other” backs in Jacksonville last season were not good. James Robinson was traded to the Jets in late October after producing a respectable 4.21 yard-per-carry average that hid Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and RSR marks in the 28th and 44th percentiles, respectively, during his early season stretch with the Jaguars, and after he was gone, the guys behind Etienne were a Snoop Conner and JaMycal Hasty combo that hardly produced at the level you’d expect from NFL-caliber talents. If not for Etienne’s marks in metrics like RYOE, missed tackles forced per attempt (he was seventh among backs with at least 50 rushes), and Breakaway Conversion Rate (his numbers landed in the 74th percentile), it would be reasonable to question whether his impressive team-relative efficiency figures were fraudulently boosted by a collection of breather backs that kinda sucked.

Because of that poor surrounding talent, there’s an excellent opportunity for a quality number-two to step into legitimate work in Jacksonville in 2023. Etienne ended last season with a 60.1% opportunity share that ranked 19th in the league according to playerprofiler.com, but given the wide variation in his per-game role from the beginning of the season to the end, that final number isn’t really representative of the split of work he handled at any one point in 2022: Robinson actually operated as the team’s lead back for the first six games of the season, out-touching Etienne in four of them individually and by 19 during that stretch overall, giving Etienne just a 42.4% opportunity share entering week seven. From that point on, Etienne was essentially a bellcow, out-touching the other backs on the team 191-to-60 the rest of the way (excluding the week 12 game against Baltimore in which Etienne played just 5 snaps before leaving with a foot sprain), good for a 76.1% opportunity share that would’ve ranked fifth in the NFL behind only Josh Jacobs, Derrick Henry, Saquon Barkley, and Alvin Kamara. Perhaps such a workload is indicative of a plan for continued bellcow-type volume that Pederson has for Etienne, but I think it’s likelier that the initial deference given to Robinson combined with the selection of a third-round running back and Etienne’s own lack of a true all-purpose skill-set (something we’ll get to in a bit) means that a less extreme share of the backfield work is in store for him going forward.

Travis Etienne handled a Saquon Barkley-level workload in the second half of last season.

Enter Bigsby, a three-year SEC workhorse with solid size and athleticism but a dubious track record as both a runner and receiver. I’ll let you check out the articles I wrote about Bigsby’s on-field ability earlier this offseason (here and here) for a deeper dive into his evaluation than we have time for here, but with the general skinny being that he’s a juke-happy tackle-breaker with explosive juice and questionable decision-making skills who was square-pegged into a round hole as a high-volume pass-catcher, I’m not positive where he’s supposed to supplement Etienne in this backfield. Like Etienne, Bigsby is a spotty processor who needs point-and-shoot instructions in order to maximize the dynamic ability he has with the ball in his hands, and also like Etienne, Bigsby is a problem out in space without the natural hands or technical route-running skills necessary to truly flourish as a receiver. It doesn’t matter now, but it seems to me that a dependable do-it-all guy like Roschon Johnson would’ve made more sense for the Jaguars, and even backs with narrower skill-sets -- Zach Evans, Evan Hull, Chris Rodriguez, Kenny McIntosh, etc. -- would profile as cleaner, niche-based complements to Etienne than the seemingly redundant and probably inferior Bigsby does.

Nonetheless, Bigsby is the guy the Jaguars took and we have to do our best to figure out how he’ll be used, and the first places I’d look to that end are the areas in which Etienne isn’t great. Last season, one of those areas was in the passing game. His overall efficiency was nothing to sneeze at, as his yards per reception mark of 8.9 ranked 16th among running backs and his YAC per reception mark of 10.4 ranked 8th, but post-catch skills are not the same as skills as a pure receiver, and after a collegiate career that saw screens account for 57.9% of Etienne’s total targets (compared to 29.2% of all running back targets across the FBS coming on screens), he was still riding with the training wheels on in 2022. 70.2% of his total routes were of the basic, checkdown-type variety (compared to 58.2% for running backs league-wide), and 33 of his 43 targets came either on screens or flat routes, representing a 73.3% share of his total that far exceeds the NFL-wide average of 43.6% for those same routes. Additionally, despite playing with a quarterback in Trevor Lawrence who he was supposed to have some built-in chemistry with after having played together in college, Etienne was targeted 46.4% less often on a per-route basis than would be expected based on league-wide targets-per-route-run numbers for the sorts of pass patterns he was running (a 3rd-percentile mark among all backs in the last seven years), and despite a steady diet of low degree-of-difficulty targets out in the flats and in the screen game, his 77.8% Catch Rate was right at league average.

Etienne is simply a limited pass-catcher, so it stands to reason that, at least in part, Bigsby may have been brought in to contribute on third downs. His collegiate receiving efficiency profiles similarly to what Etienne produced last season (71st-percentile YAC per reception numbers to go with a 26th-percentile Catch Rate), but he did run a varied route tree at Auburn (78th percentile in Route Diversity) that included frequent work on out, angle, dig, and wheel routes, downfield pass patterns that boast some of the highest yards-per-route-run value expectations among all routes on the running back tree. It’s also true, though, that Bigsby was never targeted at even close to CFB-average rates on a per-route basis, so his ability to actually get open on those hypothetically valuable patterns is more projection than certainty. On the other hand, he has been impressive in rookie minicamp, as Jaguars reporter John Shipley wrote on May 13th: “No player had a better day on Saturday than Tank Bigsby. [He] caught three touchdown passes, with one coming on an angle route vs. a linebacker in 7-on-7 and two others coming in the red-zone vs. an 11-man defense.” Shipley also noted that Bigsby showed “good hands, feels for zones, and burst out of breaks and after the catch.” I’m not convinced that the rookie is the answer for Jacksonville’s pass-catching needs in the backfield, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he gets a crack at trying to be.

The other area in which Etienne was pretty subpar a year ago was in short-yardage and goal-to-go situations. While running backs league-wide had a 55% success rate with 3-or-fewer yards to go and with 7-or-more men in the box, Etienne succeeded on just 42% of his 33 carries in such situations, and while running backs league-wide converted 29.1% and 45.5% of their attempts inside the 10- and 5-yard lines, respectively, into touchdowns, Etienne converted just 17.4% and 20%, respectively, of his attempts for scores in the same situations. Etienne did produce positive marks in both BAE Rating and RSR against heavy fronts, so I’m not sure that the lack of short-yardage success was really on him, but if he’s not getting the job done relative to other backs around the league, and if the Jaguars don’t really have anyone else on the roster better suited to pounding the ball inside for short gains (and unless you count Snoop Conner, they probably don’t), maybe they view Bigsby as a potential remedy to those struggles.

In their press conference following day two of the NFL Draft, Pederson mentioned that the team “loved the way [Bigsby] runs” and that “he’s a smart guy, he understand fronts and the defense and knows what he’s looking at,” while general manager Trent Baalke noted that “what he brings to the table, his physicality, the way he runs between the tackles, it was something that we needed to add to the rotation.” Such comments do seem to align with a theoretical plan to run Bigsby in short-yardage situations, and in those specific instances the team brass might be right about the young runner’s abilities: Bigsby produced a success rate of 69.8% on runs with 3-or-fewer yards to go and with 7-or-more men in the box during his career at Auburn, a mark that exceeds both the 62.8% rate posted by the collective other Tiger backs and the 63.2% rate posted by SEC runners in general during that time.

Ultimately, I’m not sold on Bigsby being a solid receiving back in the NFL, but if the Jacksonville coaching staff is going to pigeonhole him into that role while also giving him breather-back touches and high-value carries near the endzone, then we have to be worried about Etienne’s chances at improving upon a 2022 season that saw him finish as just the RB23 in PPR points per game despite averaging more than five yards per carry, running more pass routes than all but 11 backs in the league, and seeing top-10 volume in goal-to-go rushing attempts. I wouldn’t be shocked if Bigsby is just as good as Etienne in this offense or if he simply can’t hang in the NFL, but he’s likely to be a frustrating presence for Etienne’s fantasy output while also carrying significant handcuff upside (and in a true meritocracy, D’Ernest Johnson would also get 3-5 carries a week on this team). Bigsby touts hold strong and Etienne cultists stay woke, lest you show up in week three just to see a rookie tongue-kissin’ your girl in her mouth.