Football is football and talent is talent. But the mindset of your team makes all the difference.
– Robert Griffin III, athlete
College football fans can be forgiven for getting lost in the sauce of communal Baylor RB rooms lately, but one should not lose sight of the fact that this program was once one of the most consistent RB factories in all of CFB.
Between 2010 and 2016, the Baylor Bears football program had a 1,000-yard rusher every single season, a feat they’ve only achieved twice since. One of those seasons coming off the legs of a runner we’ll be discussing today: third-year player Bryson Washington.
Washington was a redshirt freshman last season when he broke out with 175 carries, 1,028 yards, and 12 TDs. However, the aggregate stats don’t tell the whole tale. Washington didn’t really take over until November, where he finished the regular season touching the rock 20+ times every game he appeared in.
A tough injury in Baylor’s bowl game vs. LSU rendered his 2024 finale as fairly unproductive, skewing his overall PPG as well (scored 2.4 points vs. LSU), but still finished the year averaging over 20 PPG.
This was in large part due to his back-to-back 47-point outings in the first two weeks of November. If we examine how often Washington scored more than 20 points in a game in 2024, the result is four times. Three out of the four scored over 30 points, so that’s how that PPG average came to be.
One of the unique things about this program is that, despite fielding a total of eight 1,000+ yard rushers between 2010 and 2016, only two(!) of those players received 200 or more carries. In other words, Baylor fields six thousand-yard rushers who did so in an extremely efficient manner. This was the case once again with Bryson Washington last year, but I posit that this had more to do with him not being the starter until late in the season, rather than a philosophical decision from the staff.
It should be noted that last year’s RB2, Dawson Pendergrass, also returns for another year with the Bears. He was a standout as well and actually carried the load in the bowl game when Washington left with an injury. Versus LSU, Pendergrass took 21 carries for 63 yards, two TDs, while also catching all three of his targets for 21 yards.
What can we expect in 2025? A B. Washington workhorse year, or a two-headed attack at RB?
Coaching & System
RB1 PPG AVERAGE — HC: 15.9 — OC: 14.141 (half ppr)
Starting with head coach Dave Aranda, we can see that he has been quite good to the RB position. However, Aranda, being a defensive coach, is (presumably) not primarily responsible for the shape of the offence. He’s had various OCs under him at Baylor, the most recent being former Cal OC Jake Spavital.
Spavital has experienced a renaissance of sorts within the CFF ecosystem over the past two seasons, as he broke the trend first, starting with Jaydn Ott at Cal, and then again this past year with Washington at Baylor.
Prior to these two seasons, Spavital was a clear committee guy. Aranda appears to have a clear preference for having one player spearhead the rushing attack. In his four seasons as head coach, three of them have had a player emerge as a workhorse.
Abram Smith was dynamite in 2021, rushing for 1,601 yards and 12 TDs on 257 carries. The following season, it was Richard Reese, who had himself something of a similar rise to Washington, catching heat in mid-September and going on a tear through the BIG12. In fact, Reese had back-to-back 30+ carry games in late October of that year. Unfortunately for him, he ended up losing his spot toward the end of the year and evidently was unable to reclaim his spot on the RB hierarchy.
The 2022 season was a complete dud with Dominic Richardson being essentially a failed experiment. And then, of course, in 2024, Washington broke out as the lead back in November.
In terms of how these guys call the offence, Aranda’s teams have skewed to the run (55%) almost every season since he’s been in charge. The only exception was 2022, which averaged a 51% pass rate.
Spavital’s grades fluctuate, and his overall average reflects this accordingly. His six-year average is an even 50/50 split. Spavital’s teams consistently move at a fast pace, ranging from 23-25 seconds per play, whereas Aranda’s Baylor teams before Spavital’s arrival were more in line with the FBS average.
Bryson Washington (6’0″, 203)
2024 RUSHING STATS: 175 – 1028 – 12 (20.2 PPG)
When people talk about small-town Texas high school football, Washington’s alma mater is the ne plus ultra of this idea.
Franklin, TX, situated in the heart of the corridor between Houston and Dallas, has a population of 1,614 people. In fact, dare I say, Washington might be the only Division I football player to come out of there (at least, for a while).
He was a relatively unheralded recruit as a high school prospect, rated a three-star by 247 Sports and the 59th-rated ‘athlete’ in the class of 2023. SMU was a significant factor in his recruitment, but I imagine the allure of playing P4 football (SMU was still a G5 school at the time of his commitment) was probably a deciding factor in his decision to commit to Baylor. He also received interest from the SEC and Big Ten via Arkansas and Indiana.
As mentioned in the opening section, his aggregate statistics from 2024 are somewhat misleading. His game log is lopsided, to say the least. He was certainly not a consistent week-to-week producer from a CFF perspective. But he did show what he is capable of with a handful of massive outings vs. BIG12 competition.
I mentioned that this program has a history of producing 1,000-yard rushers without corresponding to the carry volume, and that may very well be what we witness again in 2025 with Pendergrass still snooping around.
I think in order for that to happen, the offense as a whole has to be pretty successful, and I don’t have any reason to doubt that that will be the case with the returning WR1, QB, and RB1 from the year previous. Heck, even the TE (Michael Trigg, remember him?) is returning, though coming off an injury.
Though if we look at both the head coach and OC, both have shown to be comfortable with the idea of feeding their RB1 15-20 carries per game at various points over the last five seasons.
Bryson Washington is currently selected in the first rounds of CFF drafts without exception. This makes sense, as he’s primed to be the RB1 at the same program where he averaged over 20 PPG a year ago. Though, as mentioned, that PPG average is misleading, and I’d add that the RBs coach was pretty vocal about being a committee guy last offseason.
I think I’m lower than consensus on Washington, but still have him as an end-of-first/early second-round type of CFF prospect. In a year where the RB group is especially thin, one can’t be blamed for taking a player like this anywhere in the first round.◾
