Prospect Profile: Trayveon Williams

TRAYVEON WILLIAMS -- RB, TEXAS A&M

Todd Kirkland, Associated Press

Physical Measurables & Athletic Profile

Trayveon Williams did well for himself to measure in at the Combine at just over 5'8 and 206 pounds -- he'll never be a big back, but getting over that 3.00 pounds per inch threshold is important for his potential workload in the NFL. Of the 90 players in our database with at least one RB2-quality or better season on their resume, only 21 of them have been sub-210 pound backs with less than 3.00 pounds per inch on their frames. Williams is relatively light, but his dense, compact frame makes him more comparable to a Ray Rice or a Devonta Freeman than he is to a Bilal Powell.

Williams is an energetic runner on tape and I expected him to test as one of the better athletes in this year's RB class. That wasn't the case. His 4.51 40-time was fine, but his performance in the jumping drills resulted in a 38th-percentile Burst Score, and while I never thought Williams was an incredible stop-start cutter like Devin Singletary (I saw him as more of an open field weaver than a one-on-one juker), the Agility Score he posted is truly abysmal -- it's the 8th-worst mark in our entire database. Williams' Combine means his list of closest Athletic comps is made up of replacement-level backs and guys who weigh nearly 30 pounds more than he does.

Production Profile

Trayveon Williams has one of the more impressive age-adjusted production profiles in this year's RB class, having met rushing yards market share thresholds for success every year of his college career (based on RBs with at least one top-24 PPR season):

Tool from @theDude_Z with data courtesy of @pahowdy 

Williams' early breakout and sustained success are especially impressive considering the quality of competition he faced in the SEC (Darrell Henderson and Devin Singletary were similarly dominant in the AAC and Conference USA, respectively). He enters the NFL Draft tied for the 3rd-highest final season Dominator Rating of all 2019 RBs, boasting a 34.5% mark that is in the 74th-percentile of RBs drafted since 2007.

Despite a final season Satellite Score in just the 35th-percentile, Trayveon Williams has a decent overall receiving profile, which, as a smaller back, is especially important for his potential role in the NFL. He posted at least 19 receptions in every year of his college career, had his target share increase each season, and ended his underclassmen campaigns with Satellite Scores in the 67th and 79th percentiles. It would have been nice to see Williams' target share increase proportionally to the increase in his overall offensive role during his junior year; his Dominator Rating almost doubled from 2017 to 2018, while his coaches chose to only marginally increase his involvement in the passing game. Players with Satellite Scores in the 25.0-28.0 range have targets make up an average of 19.1% of their total opportunities, less than the overall average of 23.2%, so that 25.8 figure Williams posted during his junior year in 2018 is not ideal. A broad look at his overall profile gives a more favorable indication of his receiving ability however, as his upper-percentile Satellite Score outputs during his freshman and sophomores campaigns coupled with his steady increase in year-to-year passing game involvement bode well for his prospects as a receiving threat in the NFL. He doesn't have elite receiving chops on the level of guys in this class like James Williams or Patrick Laird, but he has a chance to become good in enough in that area to function as a team's primary satellite back. The concern in this draft class, with guys like Williams and Laird and Memphis' Tony Pollard and Miami's Travis Homer, is that a team might not have a reason to draft Williams to be their third-down back when there are players available better suited to that role.

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

Rushing Efficiency

Trayveon Williams was one of the most efficient runners among class of 2019 RBs. He's the only player in the class who played in a Power Five conference and produced above the 80th-percentile in True YPC (discounting long runs to a maximum of 10 yards), Chunk Rate Over Team (measuring a player's rate of 10+ yard runs against the rest of his team's rate), and Breakaway Rate Over Team (using 20+ yard runs), showing that he's capable of being a homerun threat while also still able to pick up consistent yardage when he's not getting into the second level. Like most of the other small backs in the class, he did have an above-average rate of carries that lost yardage. 

data from cfbstats.com and expandtheboxscore.com

According to Pro Football Focus, while Williams gained over half of his 1759 rushing yards after contact in 2018, he was a fairly marginal performer in the Missed Tackles Forced per Attempt department. Those numbers match fairly well with what you see on tape from him: more of a weaver in space who shows surprising power when making contact with defenders. My concern there is the 30th-percentile Power Score (a metric which combines size, build, and upper and lower-body strength in order to approximate player power and predict NFL workload) he produced at the Combine. If Williams' violence as a runner doesn't translate to success against bigger and stronger pro defenders, and if he doesn't have the lateral agility to evade those defenders, then how will he win at the next level? 

Similarity Scores & Overall Outlook

Trayveon Williams' potential floor is well represented in this group of closest comps:

While his athletic comps list is not particularly impressive, Trayveon Williams is a decent overall match to some good backs in Dalvin Cook and Maurice Jones-Drew.

I can see the comparison to Dalvin Cook. Both were productive college runners in good conferences, both boast good speed in otherwise unimpressive athletic profiles, and both are slightly smallish backs with good-but-not-great receiving chops. The comparison to Jones-Drew is fairly superficial, however. He and Williams are similarly sized guys with comparable upper and lower body strength, but the aspects of the MJD profile that made him such a good player -- his very dense build, his receiving ability, and his burner speed -- are things that Williams does not have.

In my opinion, the most important aspects of a RB's profile -- more than college production or athleticism -- are his ability to handle a large rushing workload and his ability to contribute in the passing game. If a back is good in one of those areas, he can have an NFL role. If he's good in both of them, he has potential to be the leader in a backfield. The players in this group of comps that Williams most closely resembles in these key areas are the runners on the 3-Down Profile list. The bad news for Williams is that what they all have in common -- not particularly big or powerful, not particularly special as receivers -- means only Tevin Coleman out of the five has been able to carve out a solid role in the NFL.

I wanted to be much more excited about Trayveon Williams than I am. He has a better receiving profile than similar backs in this class like Devin Singletary and Darrell Henderson, and was productive in a more competitive conference, and for those reasons I was a bit higher on Williams pre-combine than I was Henderson (Singletary was never even close to those guys for me). But unlike Henderson, Williams has glaring weaknesses in his athletic profile, and possesses no elite strengths with which to balance them out. Despite decently strong matches in his Path to Success comps list (which limits the player pool to just runners with at least one RB2-quality season on their resumé), I think it's much more likely that Williams is a Paul Perkins or a Jeremy Langford at the next level than a Kareem Hunt or even a Duke Johnson. I see him as a poor man's Tevin Coleman, a tweener who, with not enough power and size for a pounder role and not enough dynamic ability for a pure satellite back role, could be stuck in backfield purgatory for much of his NFL career. He's not an awful talent, but he's just a guy.

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