Prospect Profile: Devin Singletary

DEVIN SINGLETARY -- RB, FLORIDA ATLANTIC

Source of photo unknown

Physical Measurables & Athletic Profile

Everybody used to love Devin Singletary. Film grinders drooled over his phone booth jukes and tough, refuse-to-go-down running style, while the spreadsheet warriors had to fan themselves to keep from passing out upon plugging his career numbers at FAU into their production models. Admittedly, it was hard to not like the guy. He's fun to watch, he was very productive in college, and he's got a corny nickname (they call him Motor). It pained me that even before we had athletic testing numbers, intellectual honesty dictated that I be a bit of a party pooper when it came to Singletary.

Devin Singletary did well for himself at the Combine to come in standing under 5'8 and weighing over 200 pounds. That's pretty small for a pro RB, of course, but his carrying more than 3.00 pounds per inch on his frame is important for his ability to handle a large workload in the NFL -- it's much better than the 2.90 pounds per inch he was previously thought to carry. With a body type in line with guys like Devonta Freeman, Maurice Jones-Drew, Aaron Jones, and Ray Rice, Singletary's range out of outcomes migrates out of pure scat-back territory and crosses the border into possible lead-RB land.

Considering Singletary's receiving profile is less than stellar, it was especially important for him to display a build that can hold up to a large workload on the ground -- the small, slight RB that doesn't contribute in the passing game is not a successful breed in the NFL.

While I think Singletary's dense build shows he can handle a workhorse role, that doesn't mean an NFL team will give him one -- after all, he's still just 203 pounds. To overcome his size and prove he deserves a lead role like the Devonta Freemans and Ray Rices of the world, his ability on the field will have to be so good that a team has no choice but to play him. That odds of that coming to fruition are not looking good after his performance at the Combine. On tape, Singletary is a runner who wins with quick burst and fantastic lateral agility, athletic traits which have made him a highlight gif-hero. At the Combine though, he posted a 46th-percentile Burst Score and a stunningly low Agility Score that measures in the 17th-percentile. If the hallmarks of your game are rooted in below-average and truly awful measurable athleticism, the prospect of your ability translating to an NFL field has to be in serious question. Singletary's straight-line speed was also very bad, especially at his size, as his 4.66 40 time produced just a 13th-percentile Speed Score. I'm not sure how pro scouts feel about Singletary after his poor showing in Indianapolis, but any notion of his being the #1 RB or even top-5 in this class, unimpressive at it is, should be long gone. 

Production Profile

Devin Singletary enters the draft with the 3rd-highest final season Dominator Rating in the 2019 RB class with a mark of 34.5% during his junior year. That mark makes two consecutive seasons with Dominator Ratings above the 74th-percentile, as he also posted a 37.8% in his sophomore campaign. The 27.0% Rating he reached as a freshman means Singletary hit age-adjusted thresholds for NFL success every year of his college career (based on players with at least one top-24 PPR season in the NFL):

Tool from @theDude_Z with data courtesy of @pahowdy 

While Singletary's market share production profile is impressive, you'd like to see even more of an offensive monopoly from a guy playing on a Conference USA team. Singletary can only play with and against the players that line up next to and across from him, but I'm not sure he was a big enough fish that I'm inclined to look past the fact that the pond he was playing in is a small one. Go through the list of successful smaller-school RB prospects of the last decade or so (Tarik Cohen, Jay Ajayi, Aaron Jones, Chris Johnson, David Johnson, DeAngelo Williams, Ahmad Bradshaw, Austin Ekeler, Danny Woodhead, Alfred Morris, etc.) and you'll find that most of them come into the league with Dominator Ratings above 40.0%. Singletary's best mark is the 37.8% Rating from his sophomore year, so he's close to that mostly arbitrary 40.0 threshold that these types of prospects seem to hit, but to feel really good about his game translating to the NFL you'd like to have seen him own an even larger share of the Owls' offense than he did.

An even bigger red flag in Singletary's production profile is the strangely-decreasing receiving involvement that he showed from his freshman to his final season. If his freshman year was the only statistical output available to go off of for evaluating Singletary, I'd come away thinking he looked like a pretty dynamic satellite back. The 41.9 Satellite Score he posted that year would be a 79th-percentile figure (and it should be noted that his freshman year Satellite Score is the least reliable of any of his season's Scores, as target numbers from prior to 2016 are estimated due to lack of available data), but Singletary's target share and Satellite Score numbers fell in each subsequent year; he finished his junior season with just a 4.4% target share despite a 34.5% Dominator Rating, producing a 12.8 Satellite Score that ranks in the 6th-percentile of RBs drafted since 2007. There are only three players in the database with Satellite Scores at least that low that have had targets make up even 20% of their total career opportunities (carries + targets -- the average for drafted players is 23.2%), and two of them came into the league with lower-percentile Satellite Scores because they played QB in college: Jerick McKinnon, Denard Robinson, and Rashad Jennings. Singletary played RB in college at a small school in a non-major football conference and his coaches decided it was best to decrease his involvement in their passing game every year he was there. Players with Satellite Scores under 15.0 collectively have a target/opportunity rate of 14.9% and average a target/opportunity rate of 16.9%, both significantly below that database average of 23.2%. While the positive receiving production he posted as a freshman is a glimmer of hope, historical data tells us that the awful Satellite Score that Singletary enters the NFL with is a near death sentence for his potential role as a receiver. 

*note: target data from 2016  is not available (as far as I know -- I'd love to see it if it is) and is therefore estimated using 2016 reception total and 2017-18 catch rates

Rushing Efficiency

It gets worse. Despite playing in a weak conference, Singletary enters the draft as one of the least efficient runners in the entire class. While he was a pretty good big-play guy, posting a Breakaway Rate Over Team (which measures a player's rate of 20+ yard runs against the rest of his team's rate of 20+ yard runs) of 1.54%, a figure just outside the top-10 of the class, the numbers show that he was a pretty all-or-nothing runner. He ripped off 10+ yard runs at a lower rate than the rest of his team, posting a Chunk Rate Over Team of -1.22%, lost yardage on 12.34% of his runs, the 4th-highest rate in the class, and posted a True YPC average (which discounts long runs to a maximum of 10 yards) of just 3.73.

data from cfbstats.com and expandtheboxscore.com

These are truly putrid numbers for a guy ranked in the top-5 of this year's RB class by a lot of analysts pre-Combine, and look even worse now that we know the one meal ticket metric for Singletary here is something he likely can't duplicate in the NFL, as his 4.66 speed does not portend an ability to pull away from professional defenders in the second level. On tape, Singletary runs with good power for his size and often makes defenders look silly with his ridiculous jump cuts, but if all the traits don't result in efficient production against teams like Old Dominion and Middle Tennessee State, why would they against the Chicago Bears or the Baltimore Ravens? Without substance, it's all just window dressing. 

Similarity Scores & Overall Outlook

Devin Singletary's list of closest prospect comps is not encouraging for his NFL potential:

The guys on Singletary's top-5 Athletic matches list are mostly complete JAGs in the NFL, but even more damning for Singletary is that they average 226 pounds -- he is so uniquely terrible as an athlete that his closest comps are players that weigh 20 to 30 pounds more than he does.

A similar effect is present in Singletary's Path to Success comps list (a comparison that limits the player pool to guys with at least one RB2-quality season on their resumé), which is made up of runners that don't bear much resemblance to Singletary at all. His rare combination of small size, poor athleticism, and lower-percentile receiving production makes him a long shot to closely match with quality NFL backs.

Largely removing athleticism from the equation, Singletary's skillset most closely resembles the guys on the 3-Down Profile comp list, which matches players based on size, power, and projected receiving ability. As I've noted before, it's important for Singletary to show he can be a contributor in the passing game if he's going to carve out a role in the NFL -- the runners here (as well as the guys on the Production comp list) can provide some insight as to what the role of a player like Singletary might be in the pros. Positively for Singletary, the four guys on this list who've actually seen the field in an NFL game have had targets make up an average of 29% of their career opportunities, above the 10-year average of 23.2%. However, that group includes two players in Ronald Jones and Edwin Baker each with 9 career targets on 32 and 53 total opportunities, respectively. The best matches to an established NFL player with a Devin Singletary-skillset then are Benny Cunningham and Bilal Powell.

As a total package, Devin Singletary is a pretty unique prospect. There are players on his comps lists that look like him on some particular levels, but none of them are the clear path-to-success comparison that you'd like to see. Ronald Jones is the same type of smaller, productive non-receiver, John Kelly is the near-identical athletic match, and the successful guys who display a similar skillset have incomplete athletic profiles with which to compare Singletary to. Overall though, viewing this profile holistically is not an encouraging exercise; the 5'7 John Kelly-level athlete with the Ronald Jones receiving profile who failed to be an efficient runner in Conference USA is a guy I want no part of. It's possible that Singletary turns out to be a viable receiving option and a decent contributor in the NFL, but if "successful NFL career" for you means turning out to be Bilal Powell, I'm taking a shot on almost any other player in my dynasty rookie drafts. I wanted to like Devin Singletary and I hope he succeeds -- he's a highlight machine and a really fun player to watch. But the odds of him being a fantasy-viable player in the NFL simply aren't good. Even in a weak RB class, he's well outside my top-10 and the only way I'm touching him in a rookie draft is if he falls to the 3rd round after being drafted by the Chiefs in April. Just say no to Devin Singletary.

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