In putting the finishing touches on evaluations of this rookie running back class in the final lead-up to this week’s Draft, we recently talked about three pass-catching backs and are now obligated to go over the respective strengths and weaknesses of three players who (apparently) profile as more traditional two-down runners. Long-winded preambles are for beta cucks, so let’s jump right into successive breakdowns of the games of Rasheen Ali, Isaac Guerendo, and Kendall Milton.

Because he’s the most obviously interesting of these guys, let’s start with Guerendo. Everybody knows the broad strokes: he’s an insane athlete with ideal size but one of the most limited on-field resumés not only among guys in this class but in recent prospecting history in general (he averaged just 7.4 touches per game and totaled fewer than 300 touches across a six-year college career). The data dorks love him because of his ridiculous Speed Score, a 125.7 that stands as the second-highest post-Bo Jackson mark in the playerprofiler.com database (behind only Keith Marshall’s 126.9 from back in 2016), but there are good reasons to be skeptical about Guerendo’s NFL potential.

For one, the mere fact that Guerendo spent six years in school and never touched the ball more than 81 times in a season until he was a 23-year old mega-senior is cause for concern. Successful professional players are completely absent from his production comps list (the best guys “near” the top of it are Devontae Booker and Dare Ogunbowale, who – with college careers that match Guerendo’s by no more than 75.4% by my methodology – aren’t really in the ballpark themselves, and probably wouldn’t represent exciting precedent even if they were), and his miniscule body of work both raises red flags about his failure to earn more playing time and introduces small sample uncertainty into his evaluation.

The first of those concerns is largely folded over by the fact that a string of bad luck completely sabotaged Guerendo’s early-career takeoff. The Indianapolis Star reports that “he suffered hamstring injuries in 2018 and ‘19 that limited his practice. He only played one game in 2020 before sustaining another hamstring injury, putting him out for the season. Four games into the 2021 season, he suffered yet another season-ending injury when he tore the Lisfranc ligament in his left ankle.” We’d obviously prefer our running back prospects to not have a laundry list of lower-body injuries in their medical history, but for Guerendo these tribulations at least represent a reasonable explanation for not having beaten out guys like Brady Schipper and Garrett Groshek for early playing time.

At both Wisconsin and Louisville, Guerendo was pretty good when healthy and actually on the field. He ended his career with very normal passing-game deployment metrics (aDOT, rate of slot and out-wide snaps, Route Diversity, etc.), actively good marks in both catch rate and yards per target (we’ll talk more about his film shortly, but I thought Guerendo caught the ball very cleanly and even made nice adjustments to downfield and off-target throws in the few games that I watched), and a Satellite Score that shows he was actually fairly involved in the passing game relative to the size of his overall roles in the Badger and Cardinal offenses. I think that has the potential to be Guerendo’s trump card in securing a roster spot and earning gameday activity: on top of the exciting upside his physical profile lends him as a rusher, he provides jack-of-all-trades utility as a reliable receiver, experienced kick returner (his 31 career returns are more than the totals for all but three other guys in the 2024 running back class), and willing special teams contributor (Pro Football Focus says he has at least 40 career reps on four different special teams units).

Let’s now talk about Guerendo’s skills as a ball-carrier, which he used to (mostly) outperform his collective teammates on a per-carry basis at both Wisconsin and Louisville:

These numbers aren’t incredible, but at the very least Guerendo was providing value on top of the output of backfields that were led by all-conference performers like Braelon Allen and Jawhar Jordan. That’s more than could be said of historical size/speed freaks like Ben Tate, Darius Jackson, Master Teague, and Chris Henry, all of whom compare closely to Guerendo from a physical standpoint but left college with team-relative efficiency numbers deep into the negatives. Guerendo actually converts his athletic gifts into positive on-feld contributions.

That doesn’t mean he’s without weaknesses, though. His Relative Success Rate numbers are largely bad: Guerendo’s two healthy Wisconsin years saw him post marks of -12.3% and -6.7%, respectively, and the 1.9% RSR he posted last season at Louisville could only scrape his career mark up to -2.2% (which lands in the 22nd-percentile among recent NFL draftees). I also found Guerendo to be somewhat of a passenger princess on film (I watched all-22 tape of his 2023 matchups versus Murray State and Virginia Tech in addition to broadcast angle footage of last year’s USC game, across which he went 45-370-7 on the ground).

In that relatively small sample, Guerendo graded out as one of the least active decision-makers of any of the 40 backs I’ve yet studied on gap concepts, while his performance on zone runs was marked by a higher degree of mistake-proneness. I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about his schematic understanding or general pro-readiness based on 22 total carries (I didn’t chart his decision-making processes for the 23 carries he had in the USC game), but the best things I saw him do on film were follow his blocks, slide off glancing blows from defenders who seem to have misjudged his long speed, and run fast in a mostly straight line:

I don’t frame things in that way to be disparaging, and it’s certainly not a bad thing to be big, strong, fast, and willing to adhere to structure, but it’s simply true that the tape doesn’t provide a ton of evidence for Guerendo being able to read defensive fronts, maximize opportunities in adverse circumstances, or add value prior to the impact of his elite athleticism. From a physical standpoint (accounting for the elusiveness and through-contact metrics derived from my film-charting process), the Louisville product comps most closely to Allen, Dillon Johnson, Kimani Vidal, and Isaiah Davis, respectively, among backs I’ve studied, which I think makes a lot of sense. Like those guys (especially Allen, Johnson, and Davis), Guerendo doesn’t attempt many evasive maneuvers and often requires a bit of a runway to make the most of his athletic strengths (due to the tightness and lack of fluidity that his large frame imposes upon his movements). He has potential as a gap-scheme runner who will probably be best deployed on off-tackle and outside runs behind pullers, though his greatest value might be added via the versatility he provides as a niche-filler in capacities completely unrelated to running the ball. Don’t let a Combine performance be the tail that wags the dog of this evaluation, but I do see the vision with Guerendo – despite his lack of production – as a more well-rounded prospect than many of the other Speed Score heroes we’ve seen in recent years.

Let’s talk about Rasheen Ali, who – with 514 carries over four years at Marshall – has a much larger body of work from which to draw conclusions than Guerendo offers. It’s worth pointing out at the outset of this topic that Ali put no athletic testing data on record this offseason, so the most objective indications we have of his movement skills are a couple of tweets alluding to some nice mile-per-hour times he posted on various long runs (see: 1, 2). For whatever it’s worth, I thought Ali looked quick, explosive, and fast in the several games of his film that I watched, and that’s probably a good place to start on a breakdown of his NFL potential.