USC Football: Where Ronald Jones fits among nation’s top running backs

Once a four-star recruit from the state of Texas, USC football’s Ronald Jones made his mark on the college football world at the end of the 2016 season.

USC Trojans running back Ronald Jones was expected to do big things and have a breakout season in 2016. It’s hard to live up to the hype of being a starting USC running back thanks to rushers like Reggie Bush and LenDale White. The Trojan backfield is always expected to be something great between the quarterback and running backs. This season it has a chance to be once again.

With quarterback Sam Darnold and Jones headlining a talented USC offense in 2017, the sky is the limit for this team. USC has been ranked pretty consistently in the top five of most every preseason ranking entering the 2017 college football season. That’s largely thanks to the run the Trojans went on to finish the 2016 campaign, including a Rose Bowl victory over the Penn State Nittany Lions. And Darnold is getting No. 1 overall NFL Draft selection sort of hype right now.

Living in the shadow of Darnold right now is Jones who had a tremendous 2016 season. Jones rushed for more than 1,000 yards and 12 touchdowns as a sophomore.

Entering his junior season, expectations for Jones are high but not many people expect him to join the likes of Saquon Barkley, Derrius Guice, Bo Scarbrough, etc. at the top of the running back ranks. Part of the reason for that is the fact that Jones split carries among other running backs for the last two seasons. That is no longer a thing for Jones in the USC offense.

Jones finally saw a huge spike in his carries per game in the middle of last season. He got 16 carries for 77 yards and one touchdown against the Arizona Wildcats. His production would get to a career-high over the next two weeks against California and Oregon. Jones rushed for nearly 400 yards and five touchdowns in those two games alone. After the Arizona game, Jones rushed for at least one touchdown in every single game.

There’s two big questions to answer regarding Jones’ place in the college football world. One is where he fits among the best running backs in college football and the other is where he will go in either the 2018 or 2019 NFL Draft.

Chances are he declares for the 2018 NFL Draft. The answers to both those questions are yet to bet completely known. However, what we do know is Jones’ production easily surpassed that of Scarbrough last season (somewhat thanks to a split workload in the Alabama backfield) and his stats could not be trending in a better direction.

Even though Jones might be an afterthought in the minds of numerous college football fans, he still looms among the best in the nation. He at least deserves to be mentioned alongside rushers like Georgia’s Nick Chubb, Northwestern’s Justin Jackson, Vanderbilt’s Ralph Webb, and Washington’s Myles Gaskin.

Next: 5 favorites who could win 2017 Maxwell Award

The running back class, as a whole, is much thinner this season than last year. Finding the most talented rushers will be more of a chore and some names will emerge very quickly as the nation’s best. Jones should be one of those names that is talked about quite frequently by the end of the 2017 season.