With the possible exception of Raheim Sanders and pending a decision from Ollie Gordon, the biggest running back fish in the transfer portal is Trevor Etienne, a soon-to-be junior who On3 expects to end up at Georgia. I wrote a little about his situation in this article from last week, but I wanted to take a bit deeper of a dive into his profile and suss out a) how good of a prospect Etienne looks like a year out from his draft eligibility kicking in, and b) how much we should care about his transfer landing spot given that evaluation. My preconceptions are that Etienne is good (he’s currently the RB14 in my devy rankings), but I don’t have a strong take on if that means “college good” or “NFL good”, so hopefully the process of writing this article helps parse through some of the gray area in those categorizations.

Before we get into the on-field stuff, I first want to point out the strangeness of Etienne’s listed measurables. He has been listed at either 5’9 or 5’8 2/8” everywhere, but the recruiting services were all over the place on his weight back in high school: ESPN Recruiting had him at 200 pounds, Rivals had him at 207, 247Sports had him at 218, and On3 had him at 218.8. It seems like the latter two services were more accurate given that Florida listed Etienne at 217 pounds during his true freshman season, but he was then marked down at just 205 pounds during this last year. It’s certainly not impossible for a player to lose twelve pounds from one year to the next, but it’s a little weird for a running back who was trending toward NFL workhorse size to cut that much weight as an underclassman. Fewer than five percent of players in my database of running back prospects (which has seasonal measurables for most backs in the last ten draft classes and pretty much every back in the last five classes) dropped double-digit pounds from their freshman to sophomore seasons, and Etienne is joined by Dameon Pierce (curiously also a Florida guy) and Nick Brossette as the only guys in that group who went from 215+ in year one to below the 210 mark in year two (though neither of them lost more than nine pounds while doing so). It’s perhaps worth mentioning that each of Pierce and Brossette ended up putting the majority of that weight back on as juniors, but as things stand today, historical weight gain patterns indicate that Etienne is likely to measure in at 5’9 and 212 pounds during his eventual pre-Draft process.

Things are a bit more straightforward on the field, where Etienne has the following rushing efficiency numbers through two seasons:

Let’s talk about the good first. Etienne has broken a lot of tackles and ripped off a lot of explosive runs in his two years in college (his raw 10-yard run rate is the seventh-highest among all Power Five backs with 100+ attempts this season), both things that are indicative of top-level athleticism. If we filter for sub-220-pound runners with career marks above the 75th percentiles in both Chunk Rate+ and missed tackles forced per attempt posted in Power Five conferences, we’re left with just nine draftees (since Pro Football Focus began widespread charting of MTF data back in 2014): De’Von Achane, Lynn Bowden Jr., Chris Carson, Dalvin Cook, Travis Etienne, Zach Evans, Bryce Love, Kenneth Walker, and Javonte Williams. There’s obviously some selection bias going on there with limiting ourselves to drafted players, but the younger Etienne is clearly an explosive runner who shouldn’t have an issue satisfying that particular criterion. His excellent marks in yards after contact per attempt -- he ranks eighth among high-volume Power Five backs at 4.08 -- also show that his MTF numbers are not the result of low-value dancing.

Etienne’s other efficiency numbers aren’t as good. He’s been better on a per-attempt basis than his Gator teammates, but not to a degree that’s impressive relative to most eventual NFL runners, and while it does matter that these numbers were posted at an SEC school and next to other quality backs, the running back rooms at Florida were not uniquely stocked with talent during Etienne’s tenure. It also seems that his team-relative marks have been particularly sensitive to the circumstances in which he’s carried the ball over the last two seasons.

During his freshman season in 2022, Etienne ran behind an offensive line that PFF rated as the country’s 15th-best and the SEC’s third-best run-blocking unit, faced 6.70 defenders in the box on his average rushing attempt, and enjoyed 2.22 yards before contact per carry. He posted a 122.1% Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and a 4.3% Relative Success Rate under those circumstances, with 2019 Zonovan Knight, 2021 Israel Abanikanda, 2022 Jaylen Wright, 2018 Salvon Ahmed, and 2022 Trey Benson filling out the top-five most comparable single-season rushing performances (among Power Five runners and since box count data became available in 2018) to that freshman campaign for Etienne. As a sophomore this year, Etienne ran behind an offensive line that PFF rates as the country’s 50th-best and the SEC’s seventh-best run-blocking unit, faced 6.81 defenders in the box on his average rushing attempt, and saw just 1.74 yards before contact per carry. Under those more adverse circumstances, he posted a 107.8% BAE Rating and 0.0% RSR and had 2022 Jawhar Jordan, 2021 Jerrion Ealy, 2021 Bucky Irving, 2018 Travis Dye, and 2019 Ty Chandler as his most comparable historical backs.

Theoretically, the quality of a running back’s offensive line and the defensive attention paid to him at the line of scrimmage should not wag the dog of his box count-adjusted team-relative efficiency numbers. Imagine a committee backfield with five running backs, three of whom are nameless embodiments of perfectly average rushing ability, one of whom is Deon Jackson, and one of whom is Walter Payton. Now imagine three different copies of that backfield, one of which gets to play behind an offensive line made up of five Hall of Famers, one of which gets to play behind an offensive line made up of five perfectly average professional linemen, and one of which gets to play behind your local high school’s JV offensive line. Assuming these three identical backfields are all playing against the same competition, we would expect the first group to (collectively) be the most efficient, the second group to (collectively) be the second-most efficient, and the third group to (collectively) be the least efficient, but in each of those scenarios, it would be a shock to see a) anyone but Payton produce the highest BAE Rating, b) anyone but Jackson produce the lowest BAE Rating, and c) any of the three perfectly average backs to perform notably well or notably poorly relative to his teammates.

The application of these principles to actual football and real-life scenarios is not so cut and dry, but I think the idea generally holds true: because team-relative efficiency measures player performance in context, changes to that context shouldn’t have a huge effect on what the metrics say when the players involved remain (at least mostly) constant. Deviation from this general concept occurs because players don’t perform exactly the same from season to season, but also because different players thrive in different types of environments. Derrick Henry might be uniquely suited to maximizing the effects of a quality offensive line that can provide him with clear runways, but that doesn’t mean he would be proportionally as good -- relative to his teammates -- behind a poor run-blocking unit that demands he make a bunch of defenders miss at the line of scrimmage. The reverse might be true for a bull-in-a-china-shop runner like Marion Barber III or Javonte Williams (to be clear: that doesn’t mean these players would be bad with a good offensive line, just that the differentiators in their skillsets might not be as present or impactful -- relative to different types of runners -- when you level the playing field with good blocking). Similarly, some backs are better in zone schemes than gap schemes or vice versa.

I say all of that to say: I don’t know if the increase in attention paid to Etienne at the line of scrimmage and/or the decrease in performance by Florida’s offensive line are to blame for his dip in both raw and team-relative efficiency, but such an explanation shouldn’t be off the table. It’s possible that he’s simply not well-suited to chaos, something that’s worth keeping in mind through next season, into his eventual pre-Draft process, and perhaps even during the start of his pro career. Since Kirby Smart took over the program back in 2016, Georgia’s offensive line has been rated (by PFF) outside the country’s top-ten run-blocking units just twice and has offered fewer than 2.27 yards before contact per attempt -- a mark that would land in the top-20 among Power Five backs with 100+ attempts this season -- to any primary rusher (those with 100+ carries in a single season) just thrice (Zamir White in 2021, Brian Herrien in 2019, and Nick Chubb in 2016).

If that’s where Etienne ends up, he’ll almost certainly be better positioned to take advantage of his athletic traits than he was this year at Florida. Either way, I think it’s important to evaluate players in a vacuum, and it’s at least worth remembering that Etienne’s effectiveness took a sharp drop when his situation with the Gators did the same. As of now, I’m treating him like an Abanikanda-level prospect (though not as an Abanikanda-type prospect). There’s some “fast rb go brrr” appeal here, but the catfish caution that we employed with the Kendre Miller and Tank Bigsby types in the 2023 class is also appropriate.