This one of the deepest running back classes in recent memory, and throughout the offseason, several players have crystallized as favorites among the various factions of cool kids on Twitter and in the dynasty and player scouting communities at large; Kendre Miller, Izzy Abanikanda, and Roschon Johnson are notable names that fit that description, but perhaps no player in this year’s group has fire burning in the loins of the hipsters and hot-take artists quite like Tyjae Spears.

That love is not unwarranted: after a slow start to his career that included an ACL injury three games into his sophomore season in 2020, Spears became a top-five rusher in the American Athletic Conference in all three of yards, yards per carry, and touchdowns as a junior before putting up the best, second-best, and best marks, respectively, in those categories last season. The 30.8% Dominator Rating he put up on a 12-2 Tulane team that finished the season ranked 9th in the AP poll and in the 80th-percentile (in terms of total team strength) according to S&P+ means Spears’ fourth-year production is in the 87th-percentile among all seniors in college football since 2009. Such quality puts him in the same range as historical senior-year, small-school backs like Doug Martin, Kareem Hunt, Bilal Powell, and Rashaad Penny.

Spears followed up that quality final season with an impressive week at the Senior Bowl and a mixed bag in athletic testing:

At his size, Spears’ speed -- certainly in terms of his max but also regarding his first step -- is not particularly impressive, but the literal pace at which he’s able to move on the field shouldn’t be an issue. His Flying 20 of 1.97 isn’t good, but it’s faster than those of other undersized runners like Aaron Jones, Justin Forsett, and Darrell Henderson, and with an excellent showing in the jumping drills buoying otherwise ho-hum testing, Spears is comparable to many solid NFL backs from a size x athleticism standpoint:

The above runners are the ten in my database whose physical profiles are most similar to Spears’, and among them are three RB1-level producers in Brian Westbrook, Reggie Bush, and Austin Ekeler, as well as guys with enough skill to earn circumstantial fantasy relevance like Andre Ellington and Bilal Powell. The Speed Score zealots won’t be in on Spears (his 94.6 mark is in the 25th percentile), but it’s clear from the comps list that backs with his blend of body type and movement skills can and do succeed in the NFL.

If Spears is going to be more Westbrook and Ekeler than Scott and Homer, he’ll need to be a high-quality runner of the football, and his advanced rushing efficiency metrics speak to that possibility:

We’ll get to that Relative Success Rate mark in a bit, but outside of it, Spears’ efficiency profile is among the most impressive for small-school backs in recent history. Including the semi-random spattering of undrafted and pre-2007 runners, the Tulane product’s composite rushing efficiency score (calculated using a special soup of percentile ranks in the above metrics) ranks 20th out of 90 Group of 5 backs in my database. The following are those who left college with higher scores in that area:

That’s not a bad list by my estimation, and Spears is bookended on the low end by guys like Ryan Mathews, Matt Forte, and Latavius Murray, so he’s well within the range of guys who we can reasonably expect to contribute well in the NFL based solely on their effectiveness as collegiate runners.

Tyjae Spears enters the NFL with a stronger rushing efficiency profile than that of NFL stud and fellow Tulane alum Matt Forte.

The quality of Spears’ efficiency profile is indisputable, but the shape of it is not beyond reproach. All of the things that the numbers indicate he’s good at -- breaking tackles, ripping off explosive gains, furthering those gains with high-level open-field running -- are things that can often be accomplished via physical and athletic advantages over your opponents, and the area where he’s not great -- producing positive outcomes at a consistent per-carry rate -- is often more dependent on technical skill and cerebral ability at the line of scrimmage.

Because Spears will necessarily enjoy less of an athletic advantage in the NFL than he did in college (though I do think his poor performance in agility testing belies the level of lateral quickness and stop-start ability that he actually displays on the field), such a dynamic in his efficiency numbers should be a bit of a red flag. We know that guys with Spears’ physical profile can be successful in the league, but not every guy who tests like him plays like him, and not everybody who dominates a Group of 5 conference does so via splashy open-field running and elite tackle-breaking; Alfred Morris, Kareem Hunt, Jay Ajayi, Doug Martin, and Jamaal Williams were all effective small-school runners who entered the NFL with career marks in Breakaway Conversion Rate well below the 50th percentile, and while Hunt had good MTF numbers at Toledo, Ajayi and Williams left school with per-attempt tackle-breaking marks in the 9th and 35th percentiles, respectively (Morris and Martin entered the league before PFF began tracking missed tackles forced). Those guys were winning with something more (or perhaps something other) than pure physicality in college, so their being elite athletes should not have been viewed as a requirement for the translation of their games to the next level.

That’s not necessarily a requirement for Spears either, but the fact that he was not a consistent producer on the ground against the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles and the Central Florida Knights does beg the question of whether or not he’ll be able to successfully navigate the line of scrimmage and consistently churn out positive yards against NFL front sevens. One point in his favor to that end is the fact that he ended his college career by getting on track after a few years of extreme boom/bust output:

I say that he got on track, but I am being kind: a 3.7% RSR is above-average for eventual NFL draftees, but just barely (it’s in the 53rd percentile), and Spears’ performance here is relative to teammates who averaged a collective 2.30-star rating as high school recruits (a mark in the 19th-percentile among teammates of backs drafted since 2007). Basically, Spears had two low-volume seasons (he carried the ball fewer than 40 times in both 2019 and 2020), one season as the lead member of a committee backfield that saw him far outpaced by the other Green Wave runners in terms of consistent output, and another season as the undisputed workhorse in which he found a rhythm that still wasn’t very impressive relative to what we’d expect from an NFL-quality back in his situation. Spears’ career mark in RSR easily trails those of all the other small-school runners invited to this year’s Combine:

I don’t want to reduce Spears’ excellent college career to a single number, but if there’s one metric that I don’t want to see as the fly in the ointment of an otherwise-exciting player’s profile, it’s a subpar Relative Success Rate. It may be a random statistical quirk, it may be the result of a talented runner playing hero ball in the midst of an underwhelming supporting cast (though measures of offensive line play and overall team strength do not indicate that such was the case at Tulane), and it may be an already-solved weakness, but it could also be an indication that Spears will have a tougher time transitioning to the NFL than many of the cool kids believe.

I’m not yet positive where I stand on that point, but an exploration into the decision-making processes that Spears shows on film will likely offer some clarity. More on that on Thursday.