Thor Nystrom presents the scouting report for Ohio State's Quinshon Judkins heading into the 2025 NFL Draft and Combine.

QUINSHON JUDKINS BATTLES THROUGH CHILDHOOD LEG ISSUES TO COLLEGE FOOTBALL STARDOM ON THE WAY TO THE NFL

  • Quinshon Judkins
  • Ohio State | 5-foot-11 / 219 pounds
  • Comp: Knowshon Moreno

Quinshon Judkins was born bow-legged. Learning to walk, Judkins kept tripping over his own feet. Doctors suggested leg braces. During this period, Judkins developed a forward-leaning gait, walking on his tiptoes. He never got the braces. His mother, Teva Judkins, says this is where Quinshon’s “very large calf muscles for a little kid” came from. 

Judkins’ high school, Pike Road in Alabama, only started fielding a varsity football team during Judkins’ freshman season. Almost the entire roster consisted of freshmen and sophomores. The team didn’t have a weight room to work out in, so the football coaches built outdoor power, bench and squat racks.

Just as Judkins began to emerge on the gridiron, COVID threw a wrench into his recruiting process. Judkins’ junior season – the most pivotal in high school recruiting—was in 2020. Under-the-radar prospects like Judkins can raise their stock by attending recruiting camps – those were all canceled. 

Long story short, the 2021 recruiting rankings didn’t change as much year-over-year as they typically do. So Judkins, a three-star recruit, remained a three-star recruit. Ole Miss HC Lane Kiffin was amongst the group that overlooked Judkins’ ranking on websites—joining Auburn, Tennessee, Michigan, and Notre Dame—and offered early.

Judkins committed to Ole Miss in late-September. Months later, Judkins led Pike Road to the Alabama 5A state championship in its fourth year of existence. Judkins was named MVP of the state title game after running for 173 yards and 3 TD. 

Lane Kiffin was in the stands that day. Kiffin would later say that he wasn’t going to take any chances with National Signing Day the next month. Judkins arrived in Oxford in 2022, joining a backfield shared between former five-star TCU recruit Zach Evans and former first-team All-AAC Ulysses Bentley IV, an SMU transfer. 

Despite being only 18 for the majority of the season, Judkins shoved both veterans aside, running for 1,567 yards and 16 TD. After carrying the ball 274 times as a freshman, Judkins had 271 as a sophomore, earning All-SEC First-Team honors for a second-consecutive year. 

Judkins entered the transfer portal and transferred to Ohio State, with a stated desire to win a national championship. After the Buckeyes did just that in January, Judkins declared early for the NFL Draft. He will not turn 22 until October.

QUINSHON JUDKINS SCOUTING REPORT

Well-built with a prototypical frame, Judkins runs with short choppy steps. He has a herky-jerky style, creating indecision in defenders coming downhill. Judkins can string together extremely sudden micro-cuts—a shimmering target who never stops moving. 

Judkins is blessed with explosive acceleration, including out of cuts, allowing him to burst through direction changes. The trait of Judkins’ that his coaches fixate on is his vision. If a cutback lane opens, he’s going to see it. 

The game obviously moves slowly for Judkins. Approaching the line, his feet seem connected to the flow of the line, while he has sonar tracking on the movement of the linebackers. He instantly reacts to defenders movements in his peripheral vision.

"He’s just really elite with talent and vision," Kiffin said. "We ain’t teaching vision. You get really lucky when you have it as a coach with a running back who has it like him. You can see it. The way he makes people miss before they appear. That’s not coachable."

Judkins is comfortable in tight quarters, bouncy and light. He breaks a lot of tackles in the box because of his combination of agility, acceleration, contact balance, and ability to instantly get north-south out of east-west. Over his three-year career, Judkins forced 197 missed tackles, good for 81st-percentile missed tackles forced/attempt. 

Judkins’ burst is sufficient to steal the corner. He usually doesn’t get too far up the field before getting tracked down. While Judkins accelerates to top-gear very quickly, he does not have elite top-speed.

Over his career, Judkins caught 59 balls with only three drops, posting a strong 4.8% drop rate. His route portfolio did not consist of much more than checkdowns and swings, but he’s adequate in those departments. 

The same cannot be said of Judkins’ pass blocking. Though Judkins seems open to the idea, he at present lacks the instincts and technique for the work. Too frequently, he finds himself out of position to greet the most pressing danger, or at incorrect depth to complete a block. 

I saw him get out over his skis throwing hands, and I saw him so staunchly set up inside positioning that a defender breezed by his outside shoulder to get hands on the quarterback. 

Fortunately, all of the instincts that Judkins lacks in pass-pro, he has in spades as a runner. My preference for Judkins in the NFL would be for him to take rests on passing downs. Judkins is a bell-cow runner who has proven he’s capable of shouldering a heavy load. You’ll just need to pair him with a passing-down back.