I’ve dedicated a lot of thought to Tyjae Spears recently, with articles on his advanced rushing efficiency profile as well as his film dropping in the last week or so. Until now, though, I’ve failed to truly explore what is perhaps the most important element of his profile: his pass-catching chops. We know Spears has some solid athletic comps, we know he was a dominant producer in the American Athletic Conference last season, and we know he runs the ball efficiently and can make defenders look stupid in the open field, but even such a combination of factors is often not enough for 200-pound running backs to secure meaningful roles in the NFL if they aren’t legitimately good receivers.

Is Spears a legitimately good receiver? We’ll see, but his volume numbers at a small school don’t paint the most charitable picture:

Spears’ per-game receptions totals are decent, but among sub-210-pound Group of Five runners with career-best Target Share marks below 8.5% (a semi-round number that approximates the 50th percentile among all backs drafted since 2007), the most successful NFL producers are Devin Singletary, Darrell Henderson, Elijah Mitchell, Ronnie Hillman, Matt Breida, and Boston Scott. Those players collectively average a career-high in single-season receptions in the NFL of just 27.4, and Singletary’s 40 receptions in 2021 represent the high-water single-season mark for all of them. Even bigger small-school backs with low-volume collegiate receiving profiles also tend not to produce as receivers in the NFL: the best 210+ pound players according to our criteria are Alexander Mattison, Jamaal Williams, Alfred Morris, and Ryan Mathews, productive pro backs with just one season of even 40 receptions among them across 26 combined years of NFL experience. Whether big or small, even the best G5 backs don’t often turn into productive pro receivers -- let alone productive pros, period -- when they haven’t already been that in college.

Volume numbers and production profiles are not everything, however, and I refuse to be a threshold-driven robot who eliminates players from consideration based on their failure to hit a particular mark in a metric I’ve decided I care about. Spears probably needs to be a good receiver to fulfill the potential that his open-field dynamism gives him access to, and while his bird’s-eye-view receiving numbers don’t check that box for him, it’s possible for that to happen through other avenues. To that end, let’s look at Spears’ receiving efficiency numbers:

Spears’ low raw catch rate number probably belies his actual ability to catch football, as his True Catch Rate (which looks only at the targets that Sports Info Solutions deemed “catchable”) falls in line with quality receiving prospects like Bijan Robinson, Devon Achane, and Najee Harris. His career mark in yards per target ties Travis Dye’s for fourth in the 2023 class (behind only Bijan, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Kenny McIntosh, three bona fide receiving specialists), and Spears is one of only five FBS runners in this year’s class (along with Bijan, Gibbs, McIntosh, and Deuce Vaughn) who averaged over 11 yards per reception for their careers. His YAC per reception mark is second to only Zach Evans’ 12.0 average among this year’s crop.

Clearly and despite relatively low volume, Spears was a very efficient receiver as a collegian. The only nit you might pick in this area is that the other players at the top of the 2023 class leaderboard in these metrics all played against Power 5 competition, a factor that speaks more definitively to their being quality pass-catchers than does Spears’ success against mostly mid-major schools. Spears’ per-target numbers do still come in at the 77th percentile among historical prospects from G5 programs, however.

Zach Evans is the only back in the 2023 class to leave college with a higher career mark in yards per target than Tyjae Spears does.

I don’t want to invent subjective and probably-meaningless thresholds in random metrics just because I notice quirks in the data, but for whatever it’s worth, Spears’ 8.4 mark in yards per target occupies an interesting place on that statistic’s G5 leaderboard, right at the top of an apparent tier just below the more exclusive 9.0 yards-per-target area. The five guys immediately above him on that list are Kareem Hunt, Kenneth Dixon, Jay Ajayi, Kenneth Gainwell, and D’Ernest Johnson (with the aforementioned Mitchell and Henderson occupying the top two spots overall), while the five guys immediately below him are Jerome Ford, Dontrell Hilliard, Devante Mays, Bryant Koback, and Elijah McGuire (with Tony Pollard, Aaron Jones, Jalen Richard, and Scott really the only successful NFL receiving backs in this bottom 75% of the small-school sample group). Such a curiosity is hardly definitive, but who knows (and it’s entirely possible that Spears’ yards per target numbers are artificially deflated -- given the disparity between his catch rate and True Catch Rate numbers -- by inaccurate and uncatchable throws making up a disproportionate share of his total targets).

I don’t want to invent subjective and probably-meaningless thresholds in random metrics just because I notice quirks in the data, but for whatever it’s worth, Spears’ 8.4 mark in yards per target occupies an interesting place on that statistic’s G5 leaderboard, right at the top of an apparent tier just below the more exclusive 9.0 yards-per-target area. The five guys immediately above him on that list are Kareem Hunt, Kenneth Dixon, Jay Ajayi, Kenneth Gainwell, and D’Ernest Johnson (with the aforementioned Mitchell and Henderson occupying the top two spots overall), while the five guys immediately below him are Jerome Ford, Dontrell Hilliard, Devante Mays, Bryant Koback, and Elijah McGuire (with Tony Pollard, Aaron Jones, Jalen Richard, and Scott really the only successful NFL receiving backs in this bottom 75% of the small-school sample group). Such a curiosity is hardly definitive, but who knows (and it’s entirely possible that Spears’ yards per target numbers are artificially deflated -- given the disparity between his catch rate and True Catch Rate numbers -- by inaccurate and uncatchable throws making up a disproportionate share of his total targets).

Ultimately, though, Spears does have the sort of efficiency we’d want to see in order to offset an unconvincing receiving production profile. In fact, another interesting quirk in the data reveals that his marks in the three main efficiency metrics are enough to put him in a cohort of historical backs that has experienced a lot of success in the NFL:

From a usage standpoint, Spears’ time at Tulane left him with a bit of a mixed bag:

While with the Green Wave, Spears didn’t spend much more or less time lining up in creative spots than your average running back prospect does, and he was tasked with running basic routes and catching short, low degree-of-difficulty passes relatively frequently. For the most part, he was deployed as a traditional running back and asked to do traditional running back things.

The part of his usage profile that doesn’t jive with that categorization is the make-up of his route tree. Somewhat strangely, Spears ran a relatively diverse route tree despite not being targeted downfield or running advanced routes very often. That’s not a bad thing, but it is kind of weird.

Here are the advanced route types that Spears ran more often than the college average in the last two seasons (he ran too few routes to really analyze in both 2019 and 2020), listed with Spears’ RATE marks on those routes in those seasons:

Spears wasn’t targeted a ton on these routes, but it’s worth pointing out that -- based on NFL-wide yards per route run numbers for individual route types -- the routes represented here are among the most valuable for pro backs. Other than screen passes, wheel and angle routes carry significantly greater per-route yardage expectations than all other routes on the running back tree (2.62 and 2.59 yards per route run, respectively, compared to 1.38 across all routes), and while outs and digs aren’t worth a ton on their own, they’re run most often by guys who also run angle routes, so their prominence in Spears’ route tree is either harbinger or by-product of good things.

It is true that Spears’ per-route target rates on those key routes are not especially impressive, but I’m less convinced of the utility of RATE in clearly communicating things about player ability than I am for most of the other metrics we’ve covered in this article (because RATE is highly dependent on quarterback play and the route-running ability of the other and probably primary passing options at wide receiver and tight end on a back’s team), and his overall numbers in that area are not bad anyway.

Ultimately, Spears has enough in his receiving profile that I believe he can be a solid -- if not strong -- contributor in that area at the next level. There wasn’t a ton of volume and his usage wasn’t super creative, but Spears was very efficient with his opportunities and displayed competence on several downfield route types that will provide value to whatever NFL offense he ends up in. There’s not enough in the numbers to assume he’ll be the high-level, Alvin Kamara- or Aaron Jones-type receiver that many want to categorize him as, but it’s not like there’s a ton here to disqualify him from that part of his hypothetical range of outcomes either. I still believe that some of his shortcomings as a pure runner could suppress Spears’ ceiling, but the open-field juice and receiving skills are likely in place for those wanting to swing for the fences on this profile.