In putting the finishing touches on evaluations of this rookie running back class in the final lead-up to this week’s Draft, we recently talked about three pass-catching backs and are now obligated to go over the respective strengths and weaknesses of three players who (apparently) profile as more traditional two-down runners. Long-winded preambles are for beta cucks, so let’s jump right into successive breakdowns of the games of Rasheen Ali, Isaac Guerendo, and Kendall Milton.

Because he’s the most obviously interesting of these guys, let’s start with Guerendo. Everybody knows the broad strokes: he’s an insane athlete with ideal size but one of the most limited on-field resumés not only among guys in this class but in recent prospecting history in general (he averaged just 7.4 touches per game and totaled fewer than 300 touches across a six-year college career). The data dorks love him because of his ridiculous Speed Score, a 125.7 that stands as the second-highest post-Bo Jackson mark in the playerprofiler.com database (behind only Keith Marshall’s 126.9 from back in 2016), but there are good reasons to be skeptical about Guerendo’s NFL potential.

For one, the mere fact that Guerendo spent six years in school and never touched the ball more than 81 times in a season until he was a 23-year old mega-senior is cause for concern. Successful professional players are completely absent from his production comps list (the best guys “near” the top of it are Devontae Booker and Dare Ogunbowale, who – with college careers that match Guerendo’s by no more than 75.4% by my methodology – aren’t really in the ballpark themselves, and probably wouldn’t represent exciting precedent even if they were), and his miniscule body of work both raises red flags about his failure to earn more playing time and introduces small sample uncertainty into his evaluation.

The first of those concerns is largely folded over by the fact that a string of bad luck completely sabotaged Guerendo’s early-career takeoff. The Indianapolis Star reports that “he suffered hamstring injuries in 2018 and ‘19 that limited his practice. He only played one game in 2020 before sustaining another hamstring injury, putting him out for the season. Four games into the 2021 season, he suffered yet another season-ending injury when he tore the Lisfranc ligament in his left ankle.” We’d obviously prefer our running back prospects to not have a laundry list of lower-body injuries in their medical history, but for Guerendo these tribulations at least represent a reasonable explanation for not having beaten out guys like Brady Schipper and Garrett Groshek for early playing time.

At both Wisconsin and Louisville, Guerendo was pretty good when healthy and actually on the field. He ended his career with very normal passing-game deployment metrics (aDOT, rate of slot and out-wide snaps, Route Diversity, etc.), actively good marks in both catch rate and yards per target (we’ll talk more about his film shortly, but I thought Guerendo caught the ball very cleanly and even made nice adjustments to downfield and off-target throws in the few games that I watched), and a Satellite Score that shows he was actually fairly involved in the passing game relative to the size of his overall roles in the Badger and Cardinal offenses. I think that has the potential to be Guerendo’s trump card in securing a roster spot and earning gameday activity: on top of the exciting upside his physical profile lends him as a rusher, he provides jack-of-all-trades utility as a reliable receiver, experienced kick returner (his 31 career returns are more than the totals for all but three other guys in the 2024 running back class), and willing special teams contributor (Pro Football Focus says he has at least 40 career reps on four different special teams units).

Let’s now talk about Guerendo’s skills as a ball-carrier, which he used to (mostly) outperform his collective teammates on a per-carry basis at both Wisconsin and Louisville:

These numbers aren’t incredible, but at the very least Guerendo was providing value on top of the output of backfields that were led by all-conference performers like Braelon Allen and Jawhar Jordan. That’s more than could be said of historical size/speed freaks like Ben Tate, Darius Jackson, Master Teague, and Chris Henry, all of whom compare closely to Guerendo from a physical standpoint but left college with team-relative efficiency numbers deep into the negatives. Guerendo actually converts his athletic gifts into positive on-feld contributions.

That doesn’t mean he’s without weaknesses, though. His Relative Success Rate numbers are largely bad: Guerendo’s two healthy Wisconsin years saw him post marks of -12.3% and -6.7%, respectively, and the 1.9% RSR he posted last season at Louisville could only scrape his career mark up to -2.2% (which lands in the 22nd-percentile among recent NFL draftees). I also found Guerendo to be somewhat of a passenger princess on film (I watched all-22 tape of his 2023 matchups versus Murray State and Virginia Tech in addition to broadcast angle footage of last year’s USC game, across which he went 45-370-7 on the ground).

In that relatively small sample, Guerendo graded out as one of the least active decision-makers of any of the 40 backs I’ve yet studied on gap concepts, while his performance on zone runs was marked by a higher degree of mistake-proneness. I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about his schematic understanding or general pro-readiness based on 22 total carries (I didn’t chart his decision-making processes for the 23 carries he had in the USC game), but the best things I saw him do on film were follow his blocks, slide off glancing blows from defenders who seem to have misjudged his long speed, and run fast in a mostly straight line:

I don’t frame things in that way to be disparaging, and it’s certainly not a bad thing to be big, strong, fast, and willing to adhere to structure, but it’s simply true that the tape doesn’t provide a ton of evidence for Guerendo being able to read defensive fronts, maximize opportunities in adverse circumstances, or add value prior to the impact of his elite athleticism. From a physical standpoint (accounting for the elusiveness and through-contact metrics derived from my film-charting process), the Louisville product comps most closely to Allen, Dillon Johnson, Kimani Vidal, and Isaiah Davis, respectively, among backs I’ve studied, which I think makes a lot of sense. Like those guys (especially Allen, Johnson, and Davis), Guerendo doesn’t attempt many evasive maneuvers and often requires a bit of a runway to make the most of his athletic strengths (due to the tightness and lack of fluidity that his large frame imposes upon his movements). He has potential as a gap-scheme runner who will probably be best deployed on off-tackle and outside runs behind pullers, though his greatest value might be added via the versatility he provides as a niche-filler in capacities completely unrelated to running the ball. Don’t let a Combine performance be the tail that wags the dog of this evaluation, but I do see the vision with Guerendo – despite his lack of production – as a more well-rounded prospect than many of the other Speed Score heroes we’ve seen in recent years.

Let’s talk about Rasheen Ali, who – with 514 carries over four years at Marshall – has a much larger body of work from which to draw conclusions than Guerendo offers. It’s worth pointing out at the outset of this topic that Ali put no athletic testing data on record this offseason, so the most objective indications we have of his movement skills are a couple of tweets alluding to some nice mile-per-hour times he posted on various long runs (see: 1, 2). For whatever it’s worth, I thought Ali looked quick, explosive, and fast in the several games of his film that I watched, and that’s probably a good place to start on a breakdown of his NFL potential.

While the only all-22 tape I found of Ali was the 2023 game against North Carolina State in which he turned 14 carries into 63 yards, a treasure trove of broadcast cutups can be found of him on YouTube. I only charted his decision-making in that NC State matchup, but adding the rest of the games (the 2023 matchups versus Georgia Southern and Albany, and the 2021 matchups versus Appalachian State and Louisiana) into the sample means I was able to chart 88 carries, 546 yards, and eight touchdowns’ worth of his elusiveness and through-contact ability.

Massive caveats apply here for the small sample against NC State, but I was very impressed with Ali’s performance on outside zone runs in that game. He identified the right cutback lanes, he maintained an outside track when no such lanes presented themselves, and – quite impressively on this particular play (note how he feints toward the backside of the play in order to suck #10 into traffic and out of tackling position) – he showed schematic understanding and control in manipulating defenders out of position in order to create open space beyond what his offensive line had blocked for him. Again, it’s a very small sample, but if Ali’s performance against the Wolfpack is at all reflective of his comfort level with outside zone in general, then he rivals Jonathon Brooks as the best at executing that concept of anyone I’ve studied in the last two years. The dual facts that NC State is a Power Five opponent that finished the 2023 season with PFF’s 12th-highest rushing defense grade (so it’s not as if he was just beating up on an overmatched cupcake) and that Ali’s career workload skewed very zone-heavy (PFF says 74% of his total carries came on zone runs) make me think that what he put on film in that game probably is indicative of his outside zone bag more broadly.

Despite the discipline he displayed on the play I linked above, Ali’s most notable cerebral trait in the games that I watched was his decisiveness. He made quick reads (on inside zone runs, too) and exploded through his chosen gaps, a tendency that resulted in some good play-level outcomes and a surprising amount of success through contact versus defensive linemen (where Ali graded out for me as having the 10th-best power among 41 studied qualifiers) for a guy who weighed just 206 pounds at the Combine. In general, though, Ali is not a particularly powerful runner, and I think that’s his biggest weakness. His through-contact success versus linebackers graded out as below-average in the games I watched, while versus defensive backs he graded out as the single worst of any back I’ve charted. It’s ok to not be Leonard Fournette out there, but Ali’s inability to break free from tackle attempts resulted in a lot of yards left on the field. This play is the perfect example:

This is an inside zone run where Ali makes a good, decisive read to bounce and even stays relatively tight to the heels of his offensive tackle in transitioning upfield, and if he could either power through the first man (on this play it was a cornerback) or make that guy miss, he has enough speed to rip off what would have been a nearly 50-yard touchdown.

That lack of power is also reflected in the PFF data, which indicates that Ali gained an abysmal 2.55 yards after contact per attempt in 2023, the 16th-lowest mark among 155 collegiate backs with at least 100 carries last season. He was nearly a full yard better than that during his other high-volume campaign in 2021 (the COVID-affected 2020 season and an injury-shortened junior year in 2022 combine give Ali’s yearly numbers a very Doug Martin-esque feast-or-famine quality), but his career mark of 3.22 YAC per attempt also would have put him in the bottom half of the country in that metric last year. This lack of play strength wouldn’t be such a limiting factor in his game if Ali were more elusive, but he’s more or less a straight-line runner who doesn’t attempt many evasive maneuvers. I think he can make people miss, but his 17.0% avoidance rate shows that such a thing just isn’t a big part of Ali’s game. That stylistic bent resulted in a career average of missed tackles forced per attempt of just 0.19, the second-lowest mark for any FBS runner in this rookie class (ahead of only Cody Schrader’s 0.18).

Ali’s efficiency profile is otherwise pretty nice. He leaves school with a 126.5% BAE Rating and the highest RSR in the 2024 class at a cool 8.6%, while his 59th-percentile Chunk Rate+ and 84th-percentile Breakaway Conversion Rate reflect his explosive ability and open-field dynamism. He also has a history of shouldering heavy workloads and producing well under the burden of them, with two seasons of 1300+ scrimmage yards on 20+ touches per game on his resumé. I think his limitations make him a relatively landing spot-dependent player at the next level, but on an outside zone team with a good offensive line, Ali strikes me as having Raheem Mostert-type potential (the role-playing version of Mostert we saw in San Francisco, not the scorched earth anomaly we saw unleashed in Mike McDaniel’s Miami system last year). That’s not to say that he can’t run gap plays or function on inside zone, but he’s stylistically well-suited to outside zone and I wouldn’t want him banging on the inside much at all. As a quick final point on this topic, I’ll mention that Ali is probably a competent but non-special receiving option.

Small sample caveats do not apply to my evaluation of Kendall Milton (though incompetence caveats might), as I was able to watch and chart ten games of all-22 tape from his 2022 and 2023 seasons, across which he went 102-620-12 on the ground. Prior to studying that film, I was tentatively in on Milton as a two-down contributor due to his very solid resumé as an efficient rusher in the context of talented Georgia backfields. Next to running mates (including proven professionals like Zamir White and James Cook, stud underclassmen like Branson and Roderick Robinson, and Combine invitees like Kenny McIntosh and Daijun Edwards) who collectively averaged a 4.03-star rating as high school recruits, Milton (who himself entered college as a four-star guy rated just ahead of Jahmyr Gibbs in the class of 2020) finished his four-year tenure with the Bulldogs with marks above the 60th percentiles in both BAE Rating and RSR. Those numbers were accomplished despite a litany of lower-body injuries that caused Milton to miss significant time during his underclassman years and that continued to affect him as a junior and senior.

His collegiate productivity did not live up to the promise of his recruiting status – back in 2018, 247Sports’ Brandon Huffman said Milton “projects as a first-round NFL draft choice” – but over his last two seasons, the 225-pounder turned 206 carries into 1382 yards, good for an average of 6.71 yards per carry and a 55.3% raw Success Rate. Both of those marks would be good enough to rank in the top-ten among high-volume Power Five runners in any of the last eight years (as far back as Success Rate data over at Sports Info Solutions is available), and while Georgia’s dominant offensive line certainly had something to do with that output, Milton’s team-relative marks during these seasons rival the career numbers of some of the best runners in recent college football history:

Basically, Milton can run the football, a truth that became even clearer to me through the process of watching his film. On a steady diet of inside zone, duo, and outside-pulling runs against mostly Power Five opponents (only nine of the carries I charted came versus lesser competition), the Georgia product proved to be one of the most powerful backs I’ve charted in the last two offseasons. He powered through contact against both defensive linemen and defensive backs at the second-best rate among 42 qualifiers (behind only Roschon Johnson and Tiyon Evans, respectively), while his power versus all position groups graded out just above the overall scores for guys like Audric Estime, Bijan Robinson, and Leonard Fournette. His no-nonsense running style (his avoidance rate of 9.7% is very low) resulted in underwhelming missed tackles forced per attempt numbers, but only four Power Five backs (among those with 100+ attempts) gained more yards after contact on their average carry than Milton did last season. He’s big, he’s strong, and he runs hard.

I also thought Milton was good from a decision-making standpoint. Nearly half of the plays I charted of him were inside zone runs, where he displayed above-average vision and decisiveness behind Georgia’s stacked run-blocking unit. He even earned good marks in patience and discipline, showing that he can remain in control and make the most of situations when viable paths don’t immediately present themselves. Milton was a little sloppier on power, counter, and pin & pull plays to the outside (though, as on this play where he hesitated toward the backside to manipulate a pursuing linebacker out of position, flashes of brilliance appeared there as well), but his grasp of duo concepts was similar to the comfort level he showed on inside zone. In all, Milton struck me as one of the better interior and short-yardage runners in this class.

The biggest holes in his game – at least as a rusher – are a lack of long speed and a limited repertoire of evasive maneuvers. I wouldn’t call him deficiently slow, but he’s not going to erase many angles and also has a tough time getting back up to full speed when he’s forced to slow down to throw a stiff arm or make some sort of cut out in the open field. Those limitations are reflected in his 28th-percentile BCR of 25.9%, and we’ve already touched on the way his north/south style precludes him from making a bunch of guys miss. These things keep Milton from being the kind of first-round talent that it was speculated he might be as a recruit (and if he did have breakaway speed and a greater degree of lateral agility, I don’t think he’d be too far off of that lofty projection), but there’s no reason they should keep him from being an effective two-down committee back, like Tyler Allgeier, Eagles-era Jay Ajayi, or a lower-volume version of late-career Ezekiel Elliott (though I know Zeke also provided value as a pass-blocker).

It’s in that role that Milton will likely have to find a niche in the NFL, because his prospect profile is almost completely devoid of anything you might call a receiving resumé. He caught just 12 passes in his career and doesn’t have a ton of pass-blocking experience (though PFF graded him pretty highly in that area in 2023), and I’d be shocked if he’s ever a professional team’s preferred option on passing downs. That lack of versatility means he’s far from a sure bet to produce fantasy-relevant numbers, but of the guys in this class who project purely as two-down options at the next level (among them are Braelon Allen and Miyan Williams), Milton is probably the one I’m most confident can run the ball effectively in the NFL.