We talked at length about the positives and negatives in Trey Benson’s film yesterday, and today I want to reconcile those considerations with the stylistic and quantitative insights we can glean from his advanced rushing efficiency profile. Let’s get right to it:

Benson is not leaving school with a particularly impressive resume through this lens. Relative to fairly average teammates (the other Florida State and Oregon backs collectively averaged a 3.35-star rating as high school recruits, a 57th-percentile mark), his career numbers show him to have added very little value on a per-carry basis, succeeding on fewer of his attempts and gaining barely more yardage on average than a group of runners no more highly touted than the guys Devine Ozigbo played with at Nebraska (his teammates averaged 3.36 stars).

Where Benson does look good is in the open field and mano a mano with defenders. I talked a bit about both of those things (though definitely more about the latter) in yesterday’s article, but I think it’s worth pointing out how unique such a combination of specialties makes Benson among historical prospects. Being in the 99th percentile speaks pretty directly to the exclusivity he enjoys in the missed tackles forced department on its own, but Benson is joined only by Travis Etienne and Kenneth Walker as recent prospects who finished their college careers with a) an MTF per attempt average above the 0.30 threshold, and b) a Breakaway Conversion Rate above the 40% mark. With that sort of precedent added to the on-field evidence of Benson’s burst and speed, I think we should be prepared to see him smoke the athletic testing process. Etienne jumped 128 inches in the broad and posted 60th-percentile times in both the 10-yard split and full 40-yard dash, while Walker had a 65th-percentile broad jump and went 4.37 in the forty. Guys who make a lot of defenders miss and chew up yardage in the open field tend to do so because they’re great athletes, and Benson should test somewhere on that spectrum.

What Etienne and Walker did that Benson did not, however, is significantly outperform their respective situational baselines in terms of actual on-field results:

The disparity in rushing yards over expected is obvious there, and Etienne and Walker also posted significantly higher marks in both Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating and Chunk Rate+:

So, while Benson was neck and neck with the likes of Etienne and Walker in terms of breaking tackles and converting open-field opportunities into big plays, those strengths of his did not translate into impressive efficiency. The big takeaway for me here is that it’s probably more accurate to describe Benson strictly as a good open-field runner than more generally as a guy who rips off a bunch of explosive gains, but the inconsistency in his big-play production is also replicated in his per-carry output overall, where the parallels between he and Etienne and Walker continue to break down. Benson is leaving school with a Relative Success Rate in the negatives, while Etienne and Walker succeeded on 4.1% and 9.3% more of their attempts, respectively, than their teammates did (marks in the 62nd and 93rd percentiles).

I don’t mean to frame Benson’s entire evaluation around those of Etienne and Walker, and I recognize that nobody thinks he’s as good a prospect as they each were. It’s certainly not a sin to be a less well-regarded player than two guys who were selected in the first and early second round, respectively. The point here is that while Benson shares some exciting qualities with (and, to a degree, even stylistically resembles) some exciting recent prospects, we should be wary of letting a traits-based evaluation wag the dog of our overall impressions of Benson’s NFL potential. The numbers don’t tell us that he definitely has bad vision (for example), but his suspiciously unimpressive efficiency numbers indicate that something is up, and the ancillary metrics are pretty adamant that the issue is not athleticism. If he is indeed one of these more-athlete-than-running-back types, then – just as with athletic wide receivers with great YAC and contested catch skills – he belongs to a genre of player that is vulnerable to becoming overrated by virtue of doing the sexy things really well. Recent examples of this phenomenon include Cam Akers, Tank Bigsby, Antonio Gibson, Kendre Miller (though I acknowledge that particular judgment might be premature), and Miles Sanders.

Overrated players and those whose games might include more flash than substance can still be effective in real life and useful in fantasy football (obviously, as Akers, Gibson, and Sanders have shown us in the past), but there’s another reason I’m slightly wary of Benson. His 2022 season was – strangely – so much better than his 2023 (color-coded based on percentile rank among collegiate backs with 100+ carries):

The massive disparity between these two performances begs explanation, but I can’t land on a good one. You might assume that Benson was hurt; give “trey benson injury” a goog and you’ll find mention of nothing but his late 2020 knee injury. You might assume his offensive line or offensive infrastructure in general took a step back; Pro Football Focus rated the Seminoles’ run-blocking unit as the nation’s 49th-best in 2022 and as its 20th-best in 2023, and the offense as a whole put up top-20 scoring numbers in both seasons. You might assume his workload was severely increased or perhaps scaled back to a point at which he could no longer find a rhythm; while playing in the same amount of games, Benson handled two more carries and nine more touches in 2023 than 2022. You might double down on assuming what must have been an unreported injury; there’s no ruling this one out, but the things Benson put on tape this year don’t strike me as the work of an injured player (and the stats you’d expect to be the most health- or athleticism-dependent are the ones that Benson kept above water this year). I have seen speculation that he was banged up a bit down the stretch, but that wouldn’t explain why he averaged fewer than four yards per carry in three of his first four games (the depth running backs averaged 4.14 yards per carry in those contests). You might finally assume that Benson was running into much heavier defensive fronts than he had been previously; he faced an average of 6.81 defenders in the box in 2022, but just 6.64 in 2023.

So what are we supposed to make of this seemingly unexplainable flip-flop from one year to the next? Without arbitrarily attaching myself to any of the above rationalizations, I have a pair of compatible theories. The first is that Benson’s knee injury was devastating enough to have accelerated his aging process (specifically in terms of his football lifespan). While a freshman and member of the scout team at Oregon in 2020, Benson tore his ACL, MCL, lateral meniscus, medial meniscus, and gracilis tendon as part of what was called a “catastrophic” injury. I’m speculating, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that such an injury ended up costing a dynamic player his longevity, or to find that such a process began to unfold in that player’s first season after his first season back.

That said, I’m not operating under the assumption that Benson’s knee is a problem unless we see some actual smoke in that direction. My second theory is based on an extrapolation of Benson’s boom/bust running style from the play level to the season level. It stands to reason that play-level rushing outcomes are less predictable – based on offensive line quality, defensive strength, whatever – when the guy running the ball is one of these more-athlete-than-running-back types who is as liable to bail out the backside in search of a home run as he is to stick to the play design and pick up a valuable few yards (Benson’s tendencies aren’t that bad, but you get what I’m saying). If that archetype of running back is a wild card on the play level, then maybe it’s also a wild card on the season level. In other words, if Benson plays a go-big-or-go-home style that is predicated on making magic in the open field and in one-on-one situations with defenders, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise when he pulls off a few less miracles and suffers a severe dip in overall efficiency as a result. After all, the relationship between his BAE Rating and RSR skewed toward per-carry volatility even in 2022, and his excellent open-field and tackle-breaking metrics in that season were the opposite of sustainable: the 0.51 MTF average he posted is the highest for any Power Five back with 100+ attempts in the last six years (and it’s the only such mark over the 0.50 threshold), and the 45.2% BCR he produced is a 97th-percentile mark that would be hard for anyone to keep pace with over multiple seasons (of all the backs drafted since 2010, only five left school with a career BCR at least that high on a sample of chunk runs at least as sizable as the 31 Benson ripped off in 2022: Jahvid Best, Khalil Herbert, Ty Johnson, Bryce Love, and Melvin Gordon). Stranger things have happened than a guy posting outlier numbers one year and then regressing toward the mean in the next.

If there is a real explanation for Benson’s dip in performance in 2023 out there to be found, and if that explanation points to the 2022 version of Benson being the guy we should expect to find on an NFL field this fall, then he might be the RB1 in this class (and in the right situation, his explosiveness could put him there regardless). The more polished games of Jonathon Brooks and Blake Corum mean that Benson probably won’t get there for me, but I wouldn’t fault those who keep him atop the rankings on the basis of athletic upside. I think it makes sense – considering the compatibility of his film with the data – to regard Benson as having a similar range of outcomes as Cam Akers, Antonio Gibson, and Miles Sanders (among other of Benson’s stylistic brethren) have entered the league with in recent years.