Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar will write about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. Now, it’s time to take a closer look at Commanders seventh-round rookie running back Jacory “Bill” Croskey-Merritt, who showed a lot in the preseason, and showed even more in Washington’s regular-season opener against the New York Giants. Croskey-Merritt could be the explosive piece this offense has needed from the backfield.
Last season, the Washington Commanders offense under Kliff Kingsbury was an unexpected nightmare for every opponent to deal with. Of course, it helped quite a bit that Jayden Daniels had what might have been the greatest rookie season for any quarterback in pro football history — both as a thrower and as a runner — but it was also how Kingsbury deployed his weapons in backfield packages designed to create defensive confusion.
The Commanders were especially lethal in what I would call “Pistol Pony Misdirection” packages, where Daniels and multiple running backs would array themselves in ways that virtually guaranteed positive plays.
That said, while these types of runs were consistently positive, they weren’t generally explosive.
Per Next Gen Stats, Brian Robinson led the Commanders in the 2024 season with 46 runs out of Pistol (where the quarterback is three yards behind the center at the snap) for 212 yards, 4.6 yards per carry, five runs of 10 or more yards, and two touchdowns. Daniels was the most explosive runner in those packages with 32 attempts for 198 yards, 6.2 yards per carry, six runs of 10 or more yards, and a touchdown.
To put that into perspective, Bijan Robinson of the Atlanta Falcons led the NFL last season in runs out of Pistol with 194 carries, 923 yards, 4.8 yards per carry, 20 runs of 10 or more yards, and eight touchdowns. Saquon Barkley of the Philadelphia Eagles was right in the ballpark with 121 Pistol runs for 626 yards, 5.2 yards per carry, 15 runs of 10 or more yards, and four touchdowns.
If you want to build your run game to any large degree out of Pistol, you need the right weapons to make it go.
In the 2025 preseason, seventh-round rookie Jacory Croskey-Merritt out of Arizona started to look like a back who could make more of those opportunities than Robinson, or Austin Ekeler, or anybody else, could. Croskey-Merritt’s 11-carry, 46-yard, one touchdown game against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 2 of the preseason made him a bit of a folk hero, but this was the preseason, and it was the Bengals defense, so who knew if any of it would kick over to the regular season?
The Commanders certainly had faith. They traded Robinson to the San Francisco 49ers on August 22, and put Croskey-Merritt behind Ekeler on the depth chart. As Ekeler is more of a do-it-all back with heavy receiving chops as opposed to a true sustaining piece of the offense — that was Robinson’s gig — things lined up perfectly for the 5’11, 208-pound Croskey-Merritt (who got his “Bill” nickname as a kid due to an unfortunate haircut) to announce his presence with all kinds of authority.
Against the New York Giants in Washington’s 21-6 Week 1 win, Croskey-Merritt did just that, and he made it look easy against a defensive line that is among the league’s most talented. Overall, Croskey-Merritt ran the ball 10 times for 82 yards and a touchdown, and as an agent of the Pistol run game, he was lethal on snap after snap. All 10 of his runs came out of some sort of Pistol look, usually with blocking tight end John Bates (the best at what he does in the NFL) and new addition Deebo Samuel adding spice to the rice, Croskey-Merritt showed patience, decisiveness, horizontal quickness, vertical second-level speed, and the ability to run after contact you would expect out of a back with a lot more skins on the wall, and a much higher draft position.
Croskey-Merritt smacked Big Blue for 8.2 yards per carry, three runs of 10 or more yards, and 4.2 yards per carry after contact.
“Yeah, for sure,” he said post-game, when asked about how the weapons around him amplified his efforts. “I feel like that just makes things a thousand times better, just having a lot of playmakers around you. It just keeps people guessing, and me being around these guys makes me want to step up to the level that these guys are at.”
While it’s all well and good for any player to take advantage of those ideal situations, it can also be said that Croskey-Merritt showed stuff we did not see from the Commanders’ other backs. That combination could well make Kingsbury’s run game even more lethal, and the Pistol Pony Misdirection among the NFL’s most dangerous concepts.
By the way, how exactly did Croskey-Merritt make it all the way to the seventh round? It’s one of the dumber cases of the NCAA being the NCAA you’ll hear. He showed a lot at Alabama State from 2019-2022, and at New Mexico in 2023, but after he transferred to Arizona for the 2024 season, a discrepancy as to whether he redshirted the right number of games led to Croskey-Merritt playing just one game for the Wildcats.
Still, the Commanders were all over him. And if you watch his New Mexico tape in 2023, you can see why.
“He turned a situation that was unfortunate into a real positive,” assistant general manager Lance Newmark said of Croskey-Merritt just after he was drafted. “You talk to the people at Arizona, and you talk to him when he was here [during a pre-draft visit], and they have so much respect for how he stayed engaged the whole way through the season. He was a great teammate, was a great practice player, was in meetings. It was like he knew he wasn’t going to play on Saturday, but you would never know it by the way he acted and prepared. Another guy that had a great spring in terms of helping himself with workouts. Worked out really well, jumped, ran fast, tested really well, helped himself in the all-star game circuit.
As to how the Commanders assessed the NFL-readiness of the player without much of a 2024 season… well, there were ways to deal with that.
“Well, obviously you watch what he did do [in 2024], [and then] go back to New Mexico film. You go through really anything you can find. There’s All-Star tape, there’s pro day tape, there’s obviously anything you can find to really get a great feel for the athlete and gauge how he does against the various levels of competition that he did face. Obviously, he only had the real limited number of snaps in 2024, but we felt confident with the athlete and with the skillset that he was going to bring to us and we had seen over the course of two or three seasons what he was capable of doing for us.”
The Commanders obviously wanted Jacory Croskey-Merritt to crack their roster, and he’s done everything to validate their faith. What he does for this offense will be utterly fascinating to watch.
