Oregon's Bucky Irving Small But Tough Compared To Rams' Kyren Williams

Could he be the next surprise breakout NFL RB?

During the latest episode of their indispensable podcast for all things Los Angeles Rams, the aptly-titled Bleav In Rams, host Lindsay Rhodes broke down the play of intriguing pro prospect Bucky Irving, a Second-Team All-Pac-12 honoree this year as a junior running back on the Oregon Ducks, with a very LA-centric player comp. Cohost Michael Fabiano was standing by to hear the take.

"Let's talk about [undersized Rams running back] Kyren [Williams] because he is an interesting one in the sense that he doesn't really fit what you would expect a bell cow running back to look like," Rhodes said. "You know, this is draft and we just finished up the combine and his name came up in a comment to Bucky Irving from Oregon. And Bucky did not have a good combine at all."

"He's a small running back -- 5'9", 192. In the event that somebody is really small like that, they need to kind of traditionally blow everyone away in the combine testing and show like real elite athleticism. And he did not do that. But if you look at his tape, he was a really proficient pass catching back out of Oregon."

"And that's appealing to us [in] fantasy, right? Somebody who can catch the ball coming out of the backfield. But you put his numbers, I mean, even from a size standpoint, and then his relative athletic score right next to Kyren Williams, Kyren is like the full-on outlier in this sense where you look at like somebody like that. And he could make people who are thinking about drafting a Bucky Irving feel a little bit better about drafting him after doing what he did in Indy, because Kyren looks on paper like somebody who shouldn't be having the success that he's having in the NFL."

Williams himself was a fairly unheralded NFL hopeful coming out of Notre Dame in 2022. The 5'9", 195-pound back was selected with the No. 164 pick out of the fifth round in that year's draft by the Rams, and has since emerged as a Pro Bowl and All-Pro-caliber back while helping revamp LA's run game.