Justice Hill

Hill enters his fourth season with an uphill battle to fantasy relevance. JK Dobbins and Gus Edwards are set to return from season-ending injuries suffered in the 2021 preseason, and Baltimore has added Mike Davis and sixth-rounder Tyler Badie this offseason. And that's before noting that Hill suffered an Achilles tear of his own that is a difficult injury to come back from for a running back. The 2019 fourth-rounder is on the last year of his rookie deal, and he may get a brief opening early in the season with Edwards out for at least the first four games and Dobbins unlikely to handle a huge workload right out of the gate. Still, it looks like Davis is ahead of Hill among Baltimore's depth back.

Hill was in danger of entering his third season as an afterthought in the Baltimore backfield, even with Mark Ingram gone. The Ravens ran the ball a league-high 555 times in 2020, with Lamar Jackson, J.K. Dobbins and Gus Edwards accounting for 77.2 percent of those carries. Ingram saw a 12 percent rushing share, and that might have been Hill's ceiling as far as workload projection, had Edwards and Dobbins stayed healthy. However, just when it looked like Hill would carve out a role in the team's offense after Dobbins was placed on IR, reports surfaced in advance of Week 1 that Hill apparently suffered a serious Achilles' injury.

Last season, Hill came in as a fourth-round pick out of Oklahoma State and was expected to inject the Ravens' backfield with a dynamic element it lacked from big bodies Mark Ingram and Gus Edwards. But the rookie barely saw the field as Lamar Jackson provided that electricity instead. Hill's top-shelf speed (4.40 40-yard dash) and elusiveness could make him intriguing if he gets on the field, but the Ravens did not trust him on passing downs and rarely used him as a runner before the late stages of blowouts. The addition of J.K. Dobbins in the second round of this year's draft pushes Hill even farther from relevance, but if he can show enough to hang onto a roster spot, things might brighten considerably for Hill in 2021. Ingram and Edwards could both be in different uniforms at that point, potentially leaving Hill as Dobbins' top backup. For this season, however, he needs to improve significantly as a receiver - or have the Baltimore backfield gutted by injuries - to make any sort of impact.

Hill might provide a perfect example of the way NFL front offices play follow-the-leader. A year ago, Phillip Lindsay went undrafted out of Colorado. In 2019, Hill - a player with similar size, skills and college stats out of Oklahoma State - gets nabbed in the fourth round. While Hill's 4.40 40-yard dash at the combine stands out, his top asset is dynamite elusiveness and balance. Making defenders miss seems like second nature to him, even if poor vision often ends up costing him running room after the first or second juke. Hill also has the right tools to develop into a useful receiver, though he managed just 304 receiving yards in three seasons at OSU. Where he fits into a Ravens backfield that just added Mark Ingram remains to be seen, but Hill adds an element of open-field danger that neither of the holdovers on the depth chart, Gus Edwards and Kenneth Dixon, brings to the table.