LA Chargers: Five fun position battles after the NFL Draft

Justin Jackson and Joshua Kelley — RB2

Austin Ekeler is the obvious RB1 for the LA Chargers but the interesting thing about Ekeler is that he is not that every-down type of running back that can take the workload of running the football 20 times a game.

He is very lethal in the passing game and that passing game opens up when the team has another traditional running back that can handle most of the traditional one-cut runs between the tackles. That is why the team added to the running back room with Joshua Kelley, who absolutely could beat out Justin Jackson for the RB2 position.

I love Justin Jackson, but part of me thinks that Charger fans might have jumped the gun a bit with how much he can bring to the team. He won fans over with an electric showing against the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2018 but really has not done much else more to warrant such high praise.

Jackson has only carried the ball 79 times in his career for 406 yards. His 6.9 yards per average in 2019 was very promising but that is not something that is probably going to keep up with a bigger workload.

Of course, we could be wrong and Jackson could blossom into a legitimate offensive weapon, similar to how Ekeler blossomed behind Melvin Gordon.

Either way, the Chargers are going to get production out of their RB2 as they are either going to get a good version of Jackson or are going to get one of the most experienced and accomplished running backs in the 2020 NFL Draft to share most of the snaps with Ekeler.