I wrote a few days ago that the 2024 running back class has no player in it who satisfies all the criteria we demand from our top-end prospects, no Breece Hall- or Bijan Robinson-type who “weighs 215 pounds and runs sub-4.5 and catches the ball well and runs efficiently and has a pristine history of collegiate production and is declaring as a junior.” That statement is true, but if there’s one guy who comes closest to bucking its trend in this year’s crop of backs, one who looks and feels the most like a possible exception to its rule, I’d have to nominate the explosive Trey Benson.

A deeper dive into his data-centric profile is surely in store for some point later this offseason, but a quick scan through the big-picture checklist reveals Benson to be quite an interesting prospect: he was most recently listed at 6’1 and 223 pounds, he posted some of the fastest on-field times of any ball-carrier in either college football or the NFL last season, he averaged nearly nine yards per target over two years as the lead back on some nationally-contending Florida State teams (more efficient than Tyjae Spears’ receiving contributions at Tulane), and he finished his career with a raw per-carry average over the six-yard mark and a positive amount of rushing yards gained over expectation (according to Jerrick Backous’ RYOE tool over at campus2canton.com). Added to those factors is the fact that Benson broke a ridiculous amount of tackles for the Seminoles, with a career mark in missed tackles forced per attempt that would rank as the highest among all backs drafted since Pro Football Focus began keeping track of the metric (his 0.39 is actually tied with the rates posted by Robinson and Javonte Williams).

A 220-pound running back who can both run and fight away from defenders with the best of them presents an intriguing opportunity for those participating in dynasty rookie drafts this spring, though necessarily limited by the extent to which Benson does well the other things associated with playing the position. Can he pass protect? Can he run viable routes? Can he handle a sizable workload? Can he make good decisions at the line of scrimmage? (etc.) The NFL potential (in both real life and fantasy football) of players as disparate as Kenneth Walker, D’Andre Swift, and Tank Bigsby (to name only a few explosive tackle-breakers who produced well at Power Five programs) has been varyingly affected by those backs’ respective answers to those (and other) questions, and we can similarly not pencil Benson in for high-end outcomes at the next level on the basis of his athletic dynamism alone. The other stuff matters.

In order to better understand how some of that “other stuff” plays into Benson’s overall skill-set as a runner, I spent the early part of this week watching and charting much of the available film from his final season at Florida State. I’m saving the last bit of that film for later in the offseason (so I can revisit his game with fresh eyes), but what I have studied represents over half of his total carries, yards, and touchdowns from 2023 and was sourced from the games against Southern Miss, Boston College, Virginia Tech, Duke, Wake Forest, Miami (FL), and Florida (in which he went 87-573-12 on the ground).

The first thing you notice when cutting on Benson’s tape is his explosiveness. I’ve already pointed out the rare top speeds he’s able to reach in the open field, but his ability to accelerate quickly and burst in and out of his cuts is also remarkable (and I mean that literally, as I couldn’t help but “sheesh” or “holy shit” in response to some of the things he was able to pull off in the seven games I watched). Much of my particular film-charting process was developed with separating physical ability from cerebral decision-making as one of its primary goals, but with someone like Benson, it can be difficult to detach the impact of a high level of explosiveness from the advantages gained via quick processing and decisiveness.

On the latter front (whether due mostly to the former or not), Benson currently grades out as one of the best backs I’ve studied. On gap plays, his composite decisiveness score of 0.16 puts him in a four-way tie for second place (with Blake Corum, Tiyon Evans, and Tyjae Spears behind Zach Evans) among the 31 runners who I’ve charted a significant amount of attempts for, and he trails only Omarion Hampton with a 0.34 score on zone runs (to quickly outline what these numbers mean: I grade a runner’s performance in each of six different decision-making categories – vision, patience, discipline, decisiveness, tracking, and manipulation – as either negative (-1), neutral (0), or positive (+1) on each play, and the composite scores I’m referring to are essentially the runner’s average grade in a particular category across the entire sample of runs charted). Benson’s quick trigger and impressive burst enable him to both hit identified creases quickly and to make something positive out of situations where he isn’t able to identify a structurally appropriate path, both of which can be seen in this mini-compilation of plays on which he earned a positive decisiveness grade:

In some ways, this nebulous relationship between explosiveness and actual quick thinking gets to the heart of the “fast rb go brrr” truism: elite athletic ability is (in most cases) insufficient for high-end performance at the NFL level, but it does lower the threshold a player’s soft skills need to reach in order for him to experience fantasy-relevant success.

That’s good news for Benson, who did not stand out in many of the other cerebrally-oriented areas of my film-charting process. He did not exhibit a sound grasp of how/when to manipulate defenders out of position during his approach at the line of scrimmage (he earned just two positive manipulation grades across the entire sample of plays that I watched), his vision (while certainly not outlier-level bad) graded out well below the population mean on both outside and inside zone concepts, and his decision-making process as a whole produced higher-than-average rates of negatively graded plays on zone and gap runs alike.

Given the above factors, my general impression of Benson’s cerebral approach to solving problems at the line of scrimmage is that he seemed to not have much of an actual plan. His best “decision-making” skill (at least according to my grades) is the decisiveness that could just as easily be a proxy for his athletic talent, and it contributed to a mistake-prone running style that almost made me anxious just watching it. Benson is the kid on the playground who never gets touched in a game of tag because he’s just faster and quicker than everybody else, but he runs the football like he’s still playing tag, with the structure of designed plays barely (and sometimes simply not) corralling his enthusiasm to hit the open space he thinks he can reach elsewhere.

Statistical evidence for that subjective characterization can be found in a tidbit related to the Seminoles’ offensive line. Despite the fact that Benson finished the season ranked 20th out of 83 high-volume (100+ carry) Power Five backs in raw yards per carry and had his big boys both honored as Joe Moore Award semifinalists and finish ranked 20th in PFF’s run-blocking rating, he ranked just 54th among the same group of runners in raw Success Rate; you’d expect an athletic, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants running back to produce that sort of boom/bust output.

I can also point to specific examples in Benson’s film that suggest the absence of a plan. In this first one, he makes a perfectly fine bounce read on an inside zone play, but his propensity to turn everything outside in search of open grass ends up costing him at least a couple of yards when it causes him to completely flatten out instead of tracking off the hip of his tackle (#63) and getting upfield as soon as he escapes the “pocket”:

These next two plays are back-to-back gap runs called against Duke:

The first play is clearly more successful than the second there, but together they illustrate the coin-flip nature of depending on Benson to consistently churn out positive yards and keep your offense on schedule. He misses a developing north/south crease by overrunning his second puller to the outside on each of those runs, and the difference in outcomes is due almost solely to the fact that he pulled off a miracle of elusiveness in the first case and failed to do so in the second. Compare Benson’s decision-making process (or apparent lack of it) on those plays to Jonathon Brooks’ in a similar (though admittedly tidier) circumstance here:

Like Benson often does, Brooks probably could have turned that play outside and potentially struck gold on a huge gain, but Ray Garvin articulates the tendencies you’d like your backs to exhibit in these situations perfectly:

It’s a big part of what makes him so inconsistent on a down-to-down basis, but I don’t want to give the impression that the only indication of Benson’s planlessness is his tendency to bounce runs. He’s presented with one of those opportunities on this split zone play but simply doesn’t see it, instead panicking his way straight into interior penetration:

There’s just no world in which the read Benson made there was the right one (and I’d argue he wasn’t “reading” the play at all). It seems reasonable that he was just trying to get downhill in a short-yardage situation (you can see at the 0:03 mark that this was a something-and-three play), but that’s not a legitimate reason to charge right at a large, unblocked defender, especially when Florida’s #15 and #24 so blatantly (at least for anyone bothering to look in that direction) lost contain by selling out toward the inside of the formation.

Here’s another example of poor process:

Benson approaches the line of scrimmage on this inside zone play with two viable options: hit the A gap or hit the B gap. Neither of those paths are perfectly clear, with an interior defensive lineman (#3) initially gaining leverage to the inside of the B gap (along with #21 lurking behind him) and with a completely unblocked linebacker (#34) waiting in the A gap. Still, there’s plenty of juice to squeeze out of either option, and I think Benson squanders it. Even if you don’t take issue with his decision to ultimately hit the A gap rather than the B gap (though I would pick that nit), it would have behooved him in either case to press toward #71 in order to draw the defense in before then cutting off that block into open space. His upfield track toward the inside hip of #71 makes it appear as if that’s what he’s doing, but instead of sliding into the B gap once #21 and #3 both get sucked into the middle of the formation, Benson hesitates laterally before just diving into #34’s chest. That doesn’t strike me as the move of a running back with well-laid plans for navigating the line of scrimmage.

I’ve harped on the weaknesses in Benson’s game long enough, and I want to finish by highlighting two things that add to his on-field success. The first is the smoothness of his athleticism and the instinctual speed with which he’s able to wield it to solve dynamic problems, a feature that can be seen in this short mix of plays on which I gave him a positive tracking grade (if we’re judging only the things that happen behind the line of scrimmage, the last play in this video might be the single best run I saw Benson make across these seven games):

The deft reactions to external stimuli shown in those clips are also present in Benson’s interactions with defenders, leading to the ridiculous MTF per attempt numbers he posted at Florida State. His ability to evade would-be tacklers, however, did not show up in my charting process as readily as it did for PFF. For me, Benson graded out as having below-average levels of success through contact against each defensive position group, scoring similarly overall to (and actually slightly lower than) smaller backs like Sean Tucker and Jahmyr Gibbs. He also posted a relatively low avoidance rate, with just one attempted evasive maneuver for every 4.45 physical interactions with defenders (while the population mean is one for every 3.06). Still, those interactions produced some of the least direct contact absorbed by any back I’ve charted so far, as Benson’s 0.36 mark in contact solidity is well below the population average of 0.42 (it’s actually in a three-way tie for the fifth-lowest mark overall).

My takeaway from all this is not that the PFF metrics are somehow wrong, but instead that they are measuring something slightly different than what I am. I’m not positive what criteria they use to determine a missed tackle forced (or even a tackle attempted), but I don’t have an issue squaring the fact that Benson showed up in my charting process as a guy who isn’t super powerful and doesn’t really dance around in an effort to make people miss with PFF’s finding that he nonetheless does make a lot of people miss. His bag of evasive maneuvers is just as deep as it is sparingly dipped into, and his combination of low avoidance rate and low contact solidity tracks logically with the subjective observation that Benson often escapes tacklers or minimizes contact by simply being faster and quicker than defenders are. He doesn’t have to hit you with a bunch of dead legs and jump cuts when he can simply run away, and he doesn’t have to be Zach Charbonnet from a run-through-your-face standpoint when he’s not being contacted nearly as directly or solidly in the first place. Compared to other high-MTF runners (like the Bijan Robinson and Javonte Williams examples we talked about earlier), these stylistic factors make Benson somewhat unique (though it’s also potentially relevant that I’ve only charted carries from his final season, as PFF had him at an otherworldly 0.51 MTF per attempt in 2022 compared to a still-good-but-significantly-lower 0.29 in 2023).

Basically, Benson is a pinball: he’s fast, he bounces off everything, his best moments see him moving with an energetic and aesthetically satisfying fluidity, but he also often frustrates by misaiming his launch and – with a helpless, comical confidence – careening off into nowhere:

I have little doubt that Benson will be an explosive, big-play threat from the first moment he steps on an NFL field, but I also believe he has legitimate weaknesses in the more cerebral aspects of his game. The former will help cover up the latter, the latter will limit the former, and Benson will probably be an inconsistent professional runner as a result (just as he was in college). He reminds me a bit of Sean Tucker in these respects (especially on zone concepts), though a cleaner bill of health and a more natural feel for escaping from defenders out in space (Tucker had high contact solidity despite a high avoidance rate, and his MTF numbers never reached even Benson’s 2023 marks) should give Benson’s bid for maximizing his potential a significant boost relative to Tucker’s. It wasn’t an accident that Benson underperformed the contributions of his offensive line this season, but there’s certainly enough juice in his game to be excited about his fantasy upside near the top of this crop of rookie runners. We’ll further examine just how excited that juice should make us in an article reconciling these film-based insights with Benson’s advanced rushing efficiency profile later this week.