Even according to common advanced metrics, Evans did not have a standout amateur career. The only season in which he posted a Dominator Rating above the 20% mark (a very low threshold that would represent the 18th-percentile among eventual pro backs) was the 2021 season at TCU in which he also only played in six games.

Considering the quality of teams that he played on (measured using Bill Connelly’s S&P+ rating system) and the level at which he was responsible for the offensive production on those teams (using Dominator Rating), the NFL players whose college production profiles most resemble Evans’ are the following:

For a player considered so talented, this group of production comps represents a bit of a mixed bag for Evans’ potential draft capital outcomes (production is the strongest predictor of draft capital that I’ve found). Four of these players were selected in the first round (Felix Jones, Donald Brown, Sony Michel, and Jonathan Stewart) -- through three of those not since 2009 -- and the other six spots on the list are not occupied by guys who just slipped to the second round. Among them, we’ve got one third-round pick, two fourth-rounders, and one each of guys selected in the fifth, sixth, and seventh rounds. With a sizable standard deviation, the average round in which these players were taken is 3.3.

Things look dicier when we zoom out and compare Evans’ production profile not just to those of the guys who made it to the league, but instead to those of every college running back who played at least five games in a season going back to 2009. Using a slightly different calculation than the prior round of comparisons, here are Evans’ top ten production comps from that wider lens:

From here, Evans looks less like a mid-round pick and more like a fringe UDFA. None of these guys were taken before the third round, and three of them weren’t drafted at all.

There are non-production-related reasons why Evans is considered a good prospect, but it’s sobering to recognize that a blind taste test might put his pro potential in the same category as Toronto Argonauts legends Edwin Baker and Stanley “Boom” Williams. It’s also important to keep in mind that, while “production” is really just a bunch of numbers in a bunch of box scores, a meandering and relatively underwhelming career like the one Evans just completed has the potential to bring tangible problems with it. Every aspect of his game and his life are going to be dissected by NFL personnel departments, and with biases preceding him with the “off-field concerns” tag he became saddled with in high school, why should we expect those decision makers to look at the ups-and-downs of his college career with a sympathetic heart?

SIDENOTE: I’ve seen Evans’ low production and apparent failure to earn a workhorse role at both TCU and Ole Miss be used as a point against him in considerations of this rookie class as a whole, but while production is often an effective proxy for talent, I think drawing such conclusions would be a mistake in this particular case. I don’t have concrete evidence to point you to, so believe what you will, but I have heard from multiple third-hand sources that, behind closed doors and counter to public statements alluding to his desire for a larger hole, Evans has been vocal about preferring to maintain a subdued workload in an effort to save his body for the NFL throughout his college career. Perhaps I’m smoking the copium on a rumor, or maybe the 5-star recruit with elite per-touch efficiency in two different Power 5 conferences isn’t magically bad because he didn’t carry the ball 300 times per season.

ANOTHER SIDENOTE: David Willsey, who also does good work on running back prospects, recently tweeted a thread with some interesting points about Evans’ supposed inability to hold off Kendre Miller at TCU. The formatting of the thread isn’t very conducive to embedding, but the general gist is that Miller averaged 6.7 carries per contest in games in which Evans was also active in 2021, while Evans averaged 15.3 despite playing two of those games with a turf toe injury. Basically, it’s simply not true that Evans was beat out by Miller, and there are also injury-related factors that contributed to Quinshon Judkins’ ascension at Ole Miss last season. Given that Evans didn’t suffer any injuries of serious, long-term consequence during his college career, perhaps missing games and scaling back his touch count when not fully healthy is further evidence of his intention to preserve his body in anticipation of an NFL career. Nothing here is definitive, but I do think the arc of Evans’ collegiate career makes sense through the self-preservation lens.

I recently endeavored to develop a system for projecting draft capital for running back prospects using a mixture of thresholds and comparisons to Draft round archetypes based on an aggregate of historical data. While that system has not been forward-tested yet, it retroactively predicts the round in which a prospect will be selected in the NFL Draft with decent accuracy. Of 240 players, it perfectly projected the round in which nearly a quarter of them (23.3%) were taken, and was within one round for another 27.9%. In total, 171 of those 240 players had their eventual Draft round predicted within two (with UDFAs considered to have been drafted in the “eighth” round).

By this system, the rounds in which Evans is most likely to be selected are (in order) the third, the sixth, and the seventh.

Such a prediction seems bizarre; if you’re probably a third round pick but don’t actually end up in the third round, why should we think you wouldn’t just slip to the fourth or fifth round? I wouldn’t argue with that thought process. What is historically true, however, is that running backs taken in the third round (on average) have worse production profiles than players taken in every round but the seventh. Using a Production Score composite that I generate using a fusion of market share statistics and S&P+, the average high and low scores for players drafted in each round (going back to 2009) are the following:

I don’t have the perfect explanation for such a feature in these scores, but I do have some theories. It’s intuitive and apparent that first and second round running backs are the full package. Exceptions like Josh Jacobs and Clyde Edwards-Helaire exist (guys with large holes in their profiles, whether in the areas of production, athleticism, size, or some combination of them), but generally, the first round is where the Adrian Peterson, Ezekiel Elliott, and Bijan Robinson types are selected. For the most part, these players posted big numbers at big-time programs and had prototype size and athleticism at the Combine.

There aren’t many total package running backs available in a given Draft class, so by the time the third round rolls around, personnel departments looking for help in the backfield need to decide between a few different types of prospects. First, they could take a less productive player with quality traits; Alvin Kamara and Damien Harris were this type of third-rounder. Alternatively, NFL teams could take a dominant small school runner with an otherwise complete profile; Kareem Hunt and David Johnson were third-round selections in this mold. Finally, pro GMs could simply opt for a lesser version of the kinds of guys that typically go in the first or second round; this brand of second-tier lead backs from the Power 5 conferences typically slips into the fourth or fifth rounds, with guys like Devonta Freeman, Benny Snell, and Alex Collins as good examples.

Kareem Hunt dominated at Toledo before being taken in the third round of the 2017 NFL Draft.

While not bulletproof, I think the above trichotomy is a satisfactory illustration of why the third round tends to have lesser producers than the fourth, fifth, and even sixth rounds do. Such historical trends would put Zach Evans most cleanly in the Alvin Kamara category of sub-producers with good traits who often end up as third-round picks. Indeed, his career path closely resembles that of the archetypical third-round running back: