Acme Packing Company
After losing his rookie season to injury, MarShawn Lloyd is back on the field.
MarShawn Lloyd is back on the field in Green Bay.
After a rookie season that ended after all of 10 snaps, Lloyd practiced during the Packers’ Organized Team Activities on Tuesday, a noteworthy development after he’d previously been held out due to an unspecified injury.
In a sense, Lloyd’s unspecified injury is a story in and of itself, because we spent most of 2024 specifying the exact nature of his many injuries and illnesses: hip, ankle, hamstring, appendicitis, scurvy, tennis elbow, malaria. Okay, those last three were fake, but the fact remains that Lloyd’s 2024 season was an adventure, and not the good kind.
But now Lloyd is back — for now at least — and we should take a second to re-introduce ourselves to the 2024 third-round pick.
Daniel Jeremiah gets most of the attention in Packers’ circles when it comes to pre- and post-draft opinions on MarShawn Lloyd. When the Packers selected the USC product with the 88th pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, Jeremiah said they’d gotten a steal, nabbing the best back in the draft with one of their two third-round picks (the other being Ty’Ron Hopper). Lloyd was quick to agree, telling Sports Illustrated he was “for sure” the best back in the draft.
“I’m super-confident with that,” he told SI’s Bill Huber. “I think Daniel Jeremiah, that’s going to come up in the next few years, exactly what he says. I definitely do feel like he’s telling the truth on that part.”
For his part, Huber had the right evaluation on Lloyd, predicting he’d be the Packers’ third-round pick in his mock draft on April 20, 2024. Huber had company in his evaluation; Lloyd was 84th on the Pro Football Focus big board, he popped up at 91st on Dane Brugler’s top 100 in the 2024 edition of “The Beast,” and he came in at number 99 on the NFL Mock Draft Database consensus big board, the fifth-highest running back on the board.
Not everyone thought he’d go that high, though. He was outside the top 100 on an early April consensus big board from The Athletic and Bleacher Report predicted he’d be a fifth-round pick.
Overall, though, Lloyd seems to have landed right in the middle of the consensus pre-draft takes; not too low, and not too high.
In some respects, it’s a bit surprising he wasn’t more divisive in the pre-draft process. While there was some variance on where people thought he’d be drafted, most analysts painted a similar picture of Lloyd as a prospect: he had great athleticism, but his ability to apply that athleticism was a bit suspect.
His athleticism definitely pops. Lloyd’s overall testing earned him an 8.62 Relative Athletic Score, a very good figure for the squatty (5-8 ½, 220 pounds) back. His speed...
