Zach Charbonnet is not a controversial player. Everyone is already somewhat familiar with him after the dynasty and scouting communities got a head-start on their evaluations of his game last offseason before he surprised us by returning to school, and that -- in addition to his status as a well-known player following a strong true freshman season as a highly-touted recruit at Michigan -- means that before this offseason really even got started, the consensus take on Charbonnet had already mostly crystallized.

Because of that, it’s almost by default that Charbonnet has settled in as the RB3-or-so in this class, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, I think it’s worth considering whether such a consensus has been reached because Charbonnet is a no-doubt prospect who is obviously as good as we’ve collectively decided he is, or simply because he’s an inoffensive player without much to nitpick. Guys who “check all the boxes” are not created equally, as evidenced by the robust pre-Draft profiles of backs as varied as Ezekiel Elliott, Marlon Mack, and Joshua Kelley, so even with a well-balanced prospect like Charbonnet, it behooves us to remain open to a wide range of outcomes and avoid taking the evaluation for granted.

To that end, let’s examine the physical and athletic profile that Charbonnet established at last month’s Combine:

What particularly struck me about Charbonnet’s measurables was his weight -- after being listed at 220 pounds in all four of his college seasons (and at two different programs) following a recruiting cycle during which he weighed 215 pounds, the UCLA product came to Indianapolis at just 214. That’s not small, as 214 is slightly above average among historical running back prospects, but it’s certainly smaller than we thought he’d be and, of particular interest to me, means that Charbonnet is one of the more thinly-built runners in this year’s class. The mean pounds-per-inch ratio among historical draftees is 3.02, and the 2.96 that Charbonnet carries on his 6-foot frame means he’s proportionally built more like Kerryon Johnson or Rachaad White than the Brian Robinson- or David Johnson-type runners it seemed he would resemble.

Charbonnet likely dropped that weight in order to perform as well as he could in athletic testing, and he certainly impressed in that area relative to expectations -- many thought he might be a high-4.5 or low-4.6 guy, so the 4.53 he ran is gravy. Having said that, I do think questions about Charbonnet’s long speed were warranted and should persist in spite of a satisfactory 40-yard dash time. Whether he’ll play at 214 going forward or the 220 that he was listed at throughout college, Charbonnet’s subpar Flying 20 indicates that his max velocity is about as low as we thought it was. His 1.95 in that area is slower than the times posted by guys that nobody would confuse for speedsters like Peyton Barber, Montee Ball, and Jeremy Hill (all between 1.93 and 1.94), so while Charbonnet has an explosive first step -- as evidenced by his 10-yard split as well as his quality performance in the jumping drills -- don’t let a light weigh-in and a surprisingly fast 40-yard dash convince you that he’s a much faster player than he showed on the field. That’s not an indictment (and isn’t even necessarily something that I care about that much), but I think it’s worth keeping in mind if our aim is to understand players as holistically as possible.

Considering all the above measurables -- height, weight, and athletic testing -- the following ten players are the historical prospects who compare most closely to Charbonnet in terms of their physical profiles:

We’ve got a bit of a mixed bag here. Nearly all of these players have been at least solid contributors in NFL backfields, but it’s also the case that not many (if any) true, blue-chip prospects are represented. The closest any of them come to that is Sony Michel, who we’ll split the difference on and say was overdrafted in the first round, but he’s also a guy who I think is a decent overall comparison point for the type of player we might expect Charbonnet to be in the NFL. Michel entered the league with three-down bona fides (you’ll recall that he was getting Alvin Kamara comps coming out of Georgia) and expectations of explosive ability, and while those things never came to fruition for him, he was still able to carve out a solid role as a two-down grinder on those early Patriots teams.

Beyond Michel, the best players on this list are Mack and Tony Pollard, though guys like Brandon Jackson, James Starks, and Charles Sims also have seasons with 900+ scrimmage yards on their NFL resumés.

Where Charbonnet falls in that range of outcomes will largely be determined by how well he’s able to run the ball, an uncertainty we can gain insight to via his collegiate rushing efficiency profile:

Anecdotally, the threshold I like my running back prospects to hit in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating is 120%, and the 140.8% mark that Charbonnet posted in 2022 was enough to pull his career number over that bar. His aggregate mark in Relative Success Rate doesn’t quite reach the same heights, but it’s positive at the very least and enjoys a similar final-season boost as his BAE Rating: prior to 2022, Charbonnet had never posted a positive RSR in a single season, but the 5.4% figure he earned last year is in the 69th-percentile and falls in the same range as the career marks for dependable inside pounders like Brian Robinson, Javonte Williams, and Jonathan Taylor (all between 5.2% and 5.7%). Charbonnet becomes a very interesting option if that’s the sort of consistent output that we can expect going forward, because outside of not being a top-end open-field runner (which may just be a symptom of his subpar speed), his ancillary metrics are also pretty damn good.

To that point, Charbonnet ripped off 10-yard runs nearly 2% more often than his teammates did at Michigan and UCLA (including greater than 8% more often last season, another area in which Charbonnet’s performance as a senior mirrors Jonathan Taylor’s career output), and his rate of missed tackles forced per attempt never dipped below the 77th-percentile after his true freshman season in 2019. That ability to shed would-be tacklers also showed up in my film study, where Charbonnet charted out as having solid elusiveness on top of being the single most powerful back in this year’s class:

More detailed explanations for the scale used on these film-charting metrics can be found here, but I think the takeaways are clear from the in-class ranks listed below the scores: Charbonnet is a beast at powering through all types of contact from all defensive personnel, and he joins Zach Evans as the only two runners in the 2023 crop who score in the top quartile of the class in both aggregate power and Success Rate of evasive maneuvers. He’s big, he’s powerful, and he also has some effective wiggle to his game.

Where Charbonnet’s game has been a bit more difficult for me to get a grasp on is from a decision-making perspective:

He’s slightly below the class average but well within the range of normal on zone concepts (where patience shows up as his best cerebral trait), but Charbonnet does exhibit some problematic tendencies on gap runs. He grades out below the 2023 mean on those plays in all the decision-making categories that I chart, earning positive grades on a per-play basis less than twice as often as he earns positive grades (the average among 2023 backs is 4.6 positive grades for every negative grade on gap concepts).

Charbonnet’s biggest issue in that area is a tendency to brain fart on his approach to the line of scrimmage or while following pullers to the designed gap:

Charbonnet is the only back in this class to earn more negative tracking grades on gap concepts than he did positive grades, and my play-level notes for each of those negative grades are as follows:

Those eight negative grades occurred on a sample of 51 gap runs, giving Charbonnet a negative tracking grade rate of 15.7% on those types of plays, making him the only back in this class with a rate above the 12.8% mark in that area, and one of just two backs in this class (along with Sean Tucker) with a rate above even the 10% mark on those plays. Such a tendency also shows up on zone concepts, where Charbonnet posted a below-average net tracking score by earning negative grades on another 10.6% of his runs. These back-to-back carries against USC are good examples of this issue.

Sean Tucker is another effective 2023 runner who exhibits some of the same issues at the line of scrimmage that Zach Charbonnet does.

The good news is that this feels like a very correctable problem, and the fact that it most often manifests on gap concepts is also encouraging for the translation of Charbonnet’s game from the Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences to the NFL. He does a decent job of challenging this notion, but runners are generally less likely to screw things up on a gap run with a specific, designed hole than they are on a zone run where they are being tasked with making the right read out of several possible options. Because of that, physically gifted backs can produce and even excel in gap schemes in spite of cerebral shortcomings, and given his stature, his tested athleticism, and his measured level of on-field elusiveness and power, Charbonnet certainly qualifies as a physically gifted back.

Ultimately, Charbonnet is a talented runner with some peccadillos that have kept him from fully maximizing his potential, but he’s managed to be a very efficient and reliable ball-carrier regardless. True to consensus, I’m very on board with him just below the elite players in this running back class, and I consider him to be a box-checking prospect who should offer jack-of-all-trades appeal to NFL teams through his own version of the types of well-rounded skill-sets belonging to guys like Mack, David Montgomery, and James Conner.