Tag: Pac-12 running backs

It’s the offseason, which means that for a large majority of the college football world, it’s time to rank things.

Be it teams, schedules, players, or recruiting classes, fans always love a chance to pit their favorite school up against the best of the best in their conference or in the nation at large, seeing how they stack up against the rest.

While we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the quarterbacks and wide receivers in the Pac-12 — and for good reason — we decided to take a closer look at the running backs in the conference this week. On Saturday we ranked the top 25 rushers out west, showing which QB in the Pac-12 had the best guys running next to him. Now we want to build off of that ranking and see which team is best suited when it comes to overall RB talent.

This early in the offseason, it’s hard to know which guys are going to step up and be contributors for their respective teams. While there are a handful of new names that will likely break out and burst onto the scene, that can be hard to forecast. So for these team rankings, we looked purely at the talent at the top of the depth chart. Which QB has the most talented stable of running backs at the top to work with?

Quite simply, which school in the Pac-12 has an RB group with the most number of top-25 backs? When you break it down like that, the process is pretty simple. Let’s take a look.

We are just a few months away from what is expected to be one of the best seasons of college football in the Pac-12 in recent memory. This offseason, we’ve extensively covered the unprecedented talent out west and looked at the landscape of quarterbacks that are expected to lead their team to success in the 2023 season. We’ve also looked at the wide receivers that each QB is throwing to, and assessed which team is best set up for an entertaining season through the air.

Now we want to take a look at the players lining up in the backfield alongside those passers. Who are the best running backs in the conference heading into this season?

As with receivers, I looked at career TDs, career yards, average touchdowns per game, and average yards per game. Obviously, it’s too early to put any true or incoming freshmen on the list, so while guys like Oregon’s Dante Dowdell and USC’s Quinten Joyner could eventually find their way onto the list, they will have to prove it first.

While the metrics I used may be weighted a bit towards veteran players with more accumulated stats, the per-game averages allowed a handful of young guys to skyrocket up the list.

After looking at past production, and offseason changes — whether it be personnel or coaching, we’ve got a definitive ranking of the top RBs in the Pac-12.

Take a look.