2020 Mountain West Football Top 50 Players: #40, Utah State RB Jaylen Warren
The Utah State running back is the first Aggie to land on this year’s countdown of the Mountain West’s best athletes.
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Can he cement himself as the next great USU runner?
The Utah State Aggies perhaps still don’t get enough credit for the wealth of productive running backs they’ve developed over the last decade or so — Kerwynn Williams, Robert Turbin, Darwin Thompson, and others — but the next player on our countdown of the Mountain West’s top players appears to be well-positioned as the next in that line of program greats.
Jaylen Warren arrived in Logan after starring at Snow College up the road in Ephraim, Utah, and though he spent 2019 sharing playing time with Gerold Bright and battling the occasional injury, it’s hard to find a player in the Mountain West who did more with the opportunities he had. Not only did Warren become the first Aggie ever to crack 100 rushing yards in his first two games, the 5.08 yards per carry he averaged on 112 attempts was right in line with other star running backs like Wyoming’s Xazavian Valladay and Fresno State’s Ronnie Rivers.
Oh, and he also averaged 12.1 yards on 15 catches out of the backfield. In all, the 5.9 yards per play he averaged in 2019 is second only to UNLV’s Charles Williams and Air Force’s Timothy Jackson among the conference’s returning running backs.
With few proven options in the backfield behind him now, Warren could be in line for a much bigger workload and could be in the conversation as an all-conference performer by year’s end. Not that this would surprise the USU faithful at all, but don’t say we didn’t give everyone else a heads up.
