I watched Derrick Henry’s high school football highlight reel and I don’t see how anyone ever tackled him. As a teenager in Florida, he was a man among boys — taller, heavier, faster than the biggest kid on opposing teams. Dozens of would-be tacklers never got past would-be. They either failed to touch him or bounced off him.
As a running back at Yulee High School, in northeastern Florida near the Georgia border, Henry was equally effective at banging up the middle or sweeping around the end. Based on the highlight reel, he often took direct snaps from center and ran, virtually untouched, for touchdowns. He was freakishly fast running outside and rocketing up the sideline. He had an advanced eye for daylight and easily changed directions at top speed.
In his four years at Yulee, Henry ran for more than 12,000 yards and scored 28, 38, 34 and 55 touchdowns respectively. As I say, by his senior season, in 2012, it’s hard to believe anyone managed to tackle him.
Fourteen years later, Baltimore Ravens fans will not be surprised to hear any of this. Some of them have likely pulled up his high school highlights to get a dose of Henry’s origin story.
As a seasoned professional running back, age 32, Henry is still punishing would-be tacklers and flashing the kind of acceleration you see in his high school highlights. He gets tackled a lot, for sure, but it almost always looks like a horrible undertaking for opponents.
He’s listed as 6-foot-three and 252 pounds on the Ravens roster. There was a time in the NFL when those would have been the dimensions of an offensive guard. Henry delivers all muscle at top speed. He can run 40 yards in under five seconds. He works all year at keeping his body and legs hard. In Ravens games he appears unfazed by the brutal tackling and one-ton pileups.
Lamar Jackson is fun to watch — the most entertaining superstar in the NFL — but right beside him is King Henry.
We are seeing, week after week, what Alabama fans saw in Henry’s collegiate days and what Tennessee Titans fans saw during his first eight seasons in the NFL.
The long touchdown pass is exciting, a great punt return is exciting, a rare flea-flicker that actually works is exciting. But the big running back breaking through the line of scrimmage, his forward progress requiring multiple tacklers to stop — that’s still wildly entertaining. It has timeless appeal. A Herculean feat. An explosion of hardcore human power.
My appreciation for the big, strong running back comes from my youth as a follower of the Boston Patriots of the American Football League in the 1960s. The Pats had a big fullback from Syracuse, Jim Nance. He weighed more than 250 pounds and it was not unusual to see featherweight defensive backs and husky linebackers climbing aboard, three at a time, to bring him down. Nance told sportswriters that he would not eat for up to 16 hours before a game; the fasting, he said, made him meaner. (He appeared, at 260 pounds, to readily make up for the lack of consumption after a game.)
Nance ran for 1,458 yards in 1966. He was my favorite player on the old Fenway Park Patriots.
In the decade before that, another graduate of Syracuse, the legendary Jim Brown, tore up the NFL (and the Baltimore Colts) for the Cleveland Browns. He was scary good — a hard-body at 6-foot-2 and 232 pounds, as big as some of the linebackers who had to chase him and tackle him.
There have been many who played the role of big, bruising running back over the years — Alan “The Horse” Ameche of the bygone Colts; Pete “Cannonball” Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals; Brandon Jacobs, a 6-foot-4, 262-pounder on two New York Giants Super Bowl teams; Larry Csonka of the Miami Dolphins; Earl Campbell, a punishing back with the Houston Oilers in the 1970s and 1980s; and Jerome Bettis, the 250-pound “Bus” who ran for more than 13,000 yards, mostly for the Pittsburgh Steelers, arch-rival of the Ravens.
It’s heresy to say so here, but I was a secret Bus fan; he reminded me of the late Jim Nance up in Boston. Now, I savor Derrick Henry, playing for the Ravens, and perhaps the best of all the big guys in the backfield. He was showered with accolades in high school. He won the Heisman Trophy and a national collegiate championship while at Alabama. It’s time for him to win a Super Bowl ring with Baltimore.
Dan Rodricks writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached at danrodricks.com
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