Last year, in many arenas, was revenge of the cavemen. It was the most entertaining iteration on the professional gridiron, where the clocks were turned back to a simpler time when football was at the purest form of its ethos: hand the ball off and beat the hell out of the guy across you.
Running the ball was back in force in 2025, returning to being an efficient piece of offensive attack for the majority of the NFL. According to Pro Football Reference, 21 teams finished with positive expected point totals from their rushing games. It was 17 in 2024 and 12 in 2023.
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The steady ascension into 2025 has shown that football’s favorite pastime is returning from the land of the taboo — just in time for another explosive running back to be among the first-round draft picks this year. This year’s star runner is Notre Dame’s Jeremiyah Love, who is primed to bring his home run ability to the draft.
(Hassan Ahmad/Yahoo Sports)
Love will be the eighth running back selected in the first round since 2020. His skills have made him a coveted prospect since he was a freshman for the Fighting Irish. Over the past two years as the lead running back, Love rushed for 2,497 yards, 35 touchdowns and added 517 more yards and five touchdowns through the air. He showed durability through that stretch as well, playing in all 28 possible games for the Irish. Not only was he a consistent performer over that many games, he also had the efficiency to justify the workload. Love averaged 6.9 yards per carry over the past two years and 7.2 yards per touch. He then backed up that production with a 4.36 40-yard dash at the NFL scouting combine.
That speed is the core of his game. In the open field, his speed and elusiveness were too much for college defenders. In those 28 games, Love had a whopping 10 games where he averaged at least 8 yards per carry. He’s at his absolute best when the offensive line can clear out the muck in the front seven, giving him a runway to put a laboring linebacker or safety on an AND1 mixtape. When Love has space, he has game-breaking agility that he can keep at a top speed.
Even though he’s not the creator of the initial space (shoutout to the Fighting Irish offensive line), his ability to press off the back of the power blocking, cut against the grain to make a defender miss and explode to the end zone is rare. Having a player that’s this dangerous with the ball in his hand is always going to be an invaluable trait, no matter the position.
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For those who will inevitably mash the positional value button of panic in regards to taking a running back at the top of the draft, Love has shown that he has a lot of room to be a weapon in the passing game even though Notre Dame’s use of him in this area left some room to be desired as the Irish generally had a low-volume passing game. For a running back, he has very strong hand-eye coordination when the ball is in the air which allows him to quickly convert back into a runner. That’s an overwhelming amount of speed to instantly have in the open field when the concept and route find space for him to do what he does best.
Those positives at his size (6-foot, 214) are reason enough to make him a first-round draft pick. But no player is perfect, and Love has one flaw that he’ll have to work around or improve in the NFL — he’s not the most powerful runner between the tackles. He shows the ability to knock back linebackers in condensed spaces, but it’s inconsistent enough to be curious about how that aspect of his game will translate to the physicality of NFL defenses. For a running back that very well could go in the top five of the draft, the ability to drive through contact at the line of scrimmage could stand to improve.
To take it a step further (without getting weird), Love isn’t really built like a powerful runner in terms of lower body strength. He has a longer frame, which helps when he picks up his gait in the open field, but it’s hard for him to immediately generate power off the handoff at times. He’s at his best when the hole is open enough to read a few yards down the field, where his decision making turns damn near psychic. That adds a bit of an extra burden to the offensive line, but it’s not like Love is out here forcing negative runs all over the place. It’s a piece of the puzzle every prospect is working on in some regard.
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At the very worst, Love is going to be one of the scariest players in the league in the open field. He’s too athletic, too fast and too big for most back seven players when he has the space to operate. There are plenty of offenses that are geared toward treating their running backs as pure playmakers in space, which he should always be able to do at a high level. There aren’t nearly enough upper-echelon players in this year’s class who could justify Love not going high in the first round. Speed still kills, and soon it’ll pay.
His floor comparison could be about where Reggie Bush was (as an NFL player), making him a useful player who projects to play for a decade. If he hits his peak, this could be a bigger version of Jahmyr Gibbs, which should have teams running to grab this guy when the draft kicks off in April.
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