RB: Javonte Williams - DEN

All right, when talking about Javonte Williams, it's probably a good idea to look for the positives first. The first one would be the fact that he had 227 carries last season, 17th among running backs. That's not a bad number considering the big knee injury that he came off of from 2022. But that's about where the positives end because the big playmaking ability he showed two years ago as a rookie absolutely disappeared. The ability to make people miss, the ability to break tackles—all of those things just were not there in 2023. That could be attributed to the knee injury, so I don't want to give up on Javonte Williams anytime soon.

We have seen it before; it can take running backs a little bit of time coming back from these big knee injuries to really regain that type of playmaking ability that they had prior to it. So this year is going to be a really big season to figure out what Javonte Williams will be moving forward. Is he that guy we saw his rookie year, or is he something completely different now? The big question mark not only is going to be that, but what will the team end up doing with him because he has a head coach now that didn't see that playmaking ability from a couple of years ago, and they spent a draft pick on Audric Estime as well.

Javonte Williams is going to find himself in some pretty critical territory where he's going to have to come out of the gate hot in Week 1 and keep it up for as long as possible. As long as he plays well and as long as we start seeing that playmaking ability again, he's going to end up being just fine. But if he starts off slow and just can't get it going again, you're going to see the guys around him start to get more and more touches. If that happens, we may not even get the opportunity to see Javonte Williams get back to where he used to be.

Be very cautious with Williams this year. If you're going to spend a draft pick on him, I'm okay with it, but you can't spend a high draft pick and you can't put him on your roster as a main running back and rely on him all season long knowing that there's a lot of things still up in the air.