We’re less than a week away from the draft and reaching the end of rookie evaluation season, and with most of the big names out of the way, all that’s left for us to do is figure out how good some of the less-heralded players in this class are going to be in the NFL. It is harder to be confident in your conclusions given the fewer and muddier resources – less all-22 film, more obscure and limited data for non-FBS players, the uncertainty introduced by lower levels of competition and late-career position changes, etc. – available to us to make these fringier evaluations, but we’re going to do our best anyway. In this article, I want to talk about three players who present hypothetical upside as versatile playmakers with exciting receiving chops, and determine to what degree Dylan Laube, Tyrone Tracy Jr., and Blake Watson deserve to be taken seriously both as NFL contributors and as fantasy football assets.

Let’s start with Laube. For my money, his appeal is almost exclusively as a queen chess piece (and if that’s too speculative, we’ll say he’s a rook or something) in the passing game, because I don’t really see it from him as a runner. His numbers on the ground are not bad, as he averaged 0.80 yards per carry greater and produced ten-yard gains at a 4.7% higher clip than his New Hampshire teammates, but those team-relative marks also aren’t awesome relative to the output of other recent prospects from outside the FBS ranks. James Robinson, David Johnson, Danny Woodhead, Tarik Cohen, and Chase Edmonds all averaged at least a full yard per carry greater than their backfield mates over the course of their college careers, and grading on a level-of-competition curve means that Laube’s career average of 0.27 missed tackles forced per attempt – a mark that, in a vacuum, lands in the 52nd percentile among all backs in the 2024 class – simply isn’t as impressive as the same rate having been posted by recent FBS prospects like Breece Hall and Zach Charbonnet. In his final collegiate season, Laube’s averages of 0.14 MTF and 2.57 yards after contact per attempt ranked 99th and 91st, respectively, out of 111 FCS runners with triple-digit carries. He was much better at forcing missed tackles in 2021 and 2022, but still failed to reach even the 3.0 YAC per attempt threshold in any single season in which he carried the ball more than 63 times (and 3.0 YAC is not a high bar: in 2023, an FCS runner with such a mark would have ranked 71st out of the 111 players we referenced earlier).

This lack of through-contact ability also showed up in my charting of Laube’s film (consisting of 41 total attempts from the 2023 matchup versus Albany and the 2022 game versus Western Michigan). He didn’t qualify against defensive linemen and defensive backs, but his power versus linebackers (albeit on a small sample) graded out as the second-worst among 39 backs I’ve studied in the last two offseasons. That’s not good on its own, but Laube is also just one of two players in that population (along with Isaiah Davis) to have been charted exclusively against non-Power Five opponents. Exhibiting such little play strength against such light competition is not encouraging for his potential to contribute as a between-the-tackles runner in the NFL.

From a decision-making standpoint, Laube was a bit of a mixed bag in the two games I watched. He was generally inoffensive in this regard, but particularly on zone plays, apprehensiveness and some bizarre decisions (like when he seemingly magnetized into a mess of backfield traffic instead of finding open space on this run against Western Michigan) point to a lack of clear understanding of what he should be doing at the line of scrimmage. That makes some sense for an NFL-level athlete playing behind porous offensive lines (the New Hampshire big boys ranked 97th and 100th, respectively, out of nearly 130 FCS units in Pro Football Focus’ run-blocking grade in the last two seasons) insofar as Laube might have needed to simply out-athlete his way to successful rushing outcomes, but it still presents somewhat of a problem for his FCS-to-NFL projection.

As a final (and minor) criticism, I’ll point out that Laube also has a tendency to leave yards on the field by running out of bounds before he needs to:

Now I’ll say some nice things, which is very easy to do when we’re talking about Laube’s skill as a downfield receiving threat. His usage and deployment metrics all pop in this area: he was split out wide or lined up in the slot at a high rate, he was targeted an average of nearly two yards beyond the line of scrimmage, and he was doing enough from those alignments and at those advanced route depths to be absolutely fed in the passing game. Laube’s peak target share was the 21.6% mark he posted in 2023 (which is the same share of pass attempts that were directed at Terry McLaurin in the Washington offense last season), while his career-low of 11.0% would still be the sixth-highest career-best mark among 2024 running back prospects (it’s equivalent to Ray Davis’ top single-season figure). In all, Laube averaged 3.7 receptions per game over his career, more than double the per-game rates for guys like D’Andre Swift, Darren Sproles, James Cook, and Tyjae Spears, and trailing only Brian Westbrook – who was drafted in 2002! – among non-FBS prospects in my database.

As the deployment numbers indicate, this wasn’t just empty volume either. We don’t have Route Diversity or RATE data for Laube, but the film makes clear that he is capable of running a varied route tree and making plays at the catch point. A quick Twitter search is very fruitful on the first front, while this play is my favorite example of the latter:

There aren’t many running backs at any level of competition who can be lined up on an island and asked to haul in a deep ball down the sideline (among those who can are David Johnson, who you’ll be fascinated to learn won me a fantasy championship on this great downfield adjustment versus Kam Chancellor that looks quite a bit like the catch Laube pulled off in the above clip), and that positional versatility is what will differentiate Laube at the next level (in addition to his utility as a kick and punt returner: by my count, his 124 career returns would be the fourth-most for any post-2006 running back draftee, and he took four back for touchdowns during his time at New Hampshire).

Let’s move on to Tyrone Tracy Jr., the six-year man who spent five (four of them at Iowa) playing wide receiver before converting to running back in his final season at Purdue. His resumé therefore is not very long (even as a receiver he had just one season with even 200 receiving yards), but his efficiency marks from 2023 crack a window into his hypothetical upside as a full(ish)-time runner: