Here are my RB rankings, along with my pre-draft rankings for the 2014 & 2013 draft classes for context.
My rankings are roughly 80% number crunching and 20% my opinions.
The 80% that's number crunching includes things like what's in
this spreadsheet. In decreasing order of importance:
Athleticism: 40 time, vertical, broad jump, and to a lesser extent the agility drills
Size: weight, and to a lesser extent BMI (low is bad) & height (tall is bad)
Elusiveness: yards after contact & broken tackles, from
my tracking & Greg Peshek's
Production: long runs, short yardage/goalline success rate, receiving, and other stats
Age & Workload: younger is better, non-RB1 workload is negative
The 20% that's my opinions includes things like:
Manual adjustments: giving points for relevant things that aren't in the numbers (e.g., adjusting Abdullah down for bad pass blocking), or where the numbers seem misleading (e.g., adjusting Gurley up because his elite
yards after contact per carry suggests that my Hard to Tackle Rating is underrating his elusiveness)
My impression: a 0-10 rating of how good a RB looked when I watched him play
Finger on the scale: adding (or subtracting) a small amount to a RB if the rankings that my number crunching creates look slightly off (mostly to reorder tightly packed players based on my guesses about who is a better prospect)
These things all get entered as numbers, and the result is basically a weighted sum which outputs a numerical rating for each player.
For the rankings below, I've put the
2013 &
2014 draft classes in the same order that I ranked them before their NFL draft (which I posted to the Shark Pool then), because it seemed most relevant to compare players at the same stage of the process. (This makes things slightly tricky, because I kept tinkering with the numbers after the draft and now the numbers that I have in my files don't quite match up with those rankings. So I've had to slightly fudge the numbers in order to put them back in the order that I posted, which is not ideal for the cross-year comparisons. If two players in different draft classes are close to each other & in the same tier, think of them as similarly rated - don't read too much into one being ahead of the other.)
Enough background; here are the rankings:
2013 Eddie Lacy
2015 Todd Gurley
2015 Melvin Gordon
2013 Christine Michael
2014 Carlos Hyde
2014 Lache Seastrunk
2015 Jay Ajayi
2014 Tre Mason
2013 Giovani Bernard
2015 Ameer Abdullah
2013 Knile Davis
2014 Jeremy Hill
2014 Jerick McKinnon
2013 Jonathan Franklin
2015 Duke Johnson
2015 Tevin Coleman
2014 Bishop Sankey
2013 Marcus Lattimore
2015 David Cobb
2015 David Johnson
2014 Stephen Houston
2014 Henry Josey
2013 Zac Stacy
2013 D.J. Harper
2013 Le'Veon Bell
2013 Cierre Wood
2013 Kenjon Barner
2013 Montee Ball
2013 Latavius Murray
2014 Isaiah Crowell
2014 Andre Williams
2014 Charles Sims
2014 Dri Archer
2014 Devonta Freeman
2015 Karlos Williams
2015 Cameron Artis-Payne
2015 Josh Robinson
2015 T.J. Yeldon
2015 Corey Grant
2014 David Fluellen
2013 Treavor Scales
2015 Jeremy Langford
2013 Michael Ford
2014 Robert Godhigh
2013 Matthew Tucker
2015 Mike Davis
2014 George Atkinson III
2014 Terrance West
2015 Michael Dyer
2014 Tim Cornett
2013 C.J. Anderson
2013 Andre Ellington
2014 James White
2014 De'Anthony Thomas
2014 Lorenzo Taliaferro
Rough labels for the tiers:
Guys I like a lot: Lacy through Hyde, including 2 RBs this year: Gurley & Gordon
Guys I like: Seastrunk through Davis, including 2 RBs this year: Ajayi & Abdullah
(Awkwardly between tiers: Hill & McKinnon)
Guys who have a decent chance: Franklin through Archer, including 4 RBs this year: Duke Johnson, Coleman, Cobb, and David Johnson
Guys I can't rule out: Freeman through Taliaferro, including 8 RBs this year: Williams, Artis-Payne, Robinson, Yeldon, Grant, Langford, Davis, Dyer
The last two tiers are pretty tightly packed, and the order within them for this year's RBs could easily change (especially for Coleman & Cobb, who have pro days to run at). RBs not listed (like Javorius Allen) probably didn't make that cut, unless they're non-FBS or didn't get many carries this year (in which case they might just be missing from my data set).