JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Derrick Henry never fit the mold.
He broke the most sacred record in high school football and still — still — couldn’t convince people that he was a running back.
He was too big. Ran too high. Didn’t move well enough side to side. There were so many reasons why Henry shouldn’t be able to parlay that success to higher levels that doubters — and there were many — overlooked one small thing.
There’s never been a player like Derrick Henry.
For as much as Henry accomplished, he was essentially written off by most college programs as a running back.
But as Henry continues to pulverize NFL defenses on a weekly basis, it warrants asking the question.
How did so many people, from recruiting experts to college coaches, miss the mark so badly on the best running back in high school football history?
Simple.
Because Henry, then a hulking 6-foot-3 and 241 pounds as a senior at Yulee High School, wasn’t a prototypical running back. Players that fast and that big shouldn’t be able to do what Henry did.
Elite high school players like Eric Dickerson and Marcus Dupree, players who Henry mentioned as backs he looked up to, were bigger backs. At 6-3, Dickerson’s playing weight in the NFL was 220 pounds. At Oklahoma, Dupree, a 6-2 player, weighed 220 pounds.
Henry outweighed both by more than 20 pounds — in high school.
It didn’t matter that he had 4.5 speed and hit would-be tacklers like a linebacker with a 20-yard head start. Henry didn’t fit the blueprint of a classical running back. And since Henry didn’t check the boxes that typical backs do, then he obviously couldn’t do it at the next level.
“I think that was the result of kind of lazy scouting on a lot of people’s parts, honestly,” said Bobby Ramsay, Henry’s high school coach. “And I get it. They’re looking at a lot of players, so they don’t have a whole lot of time to sit there and break down there game too much. Just kind of glance over them, say this height, this weight, OK. I go to my chart and he’s this. That’s what he got thrown into, that group. I think a lot of coaches overthought it; they’re just smarter than everybody else and there’s no way he can play.”
Henry made his first Pro Bowl this season, led the NFL in rushing and has powered the Titans into Sunday’s AFC championship game at Kansas City. And he has accomplished something that no player in NFL history has done in the playoffs.
He’s turned in back-to-back monster games on the ground, 182 yards rushing against the Patriots and 195 against the Ravens. No other player has reached 180 yards rushing in two playoff games in the same postseason.
His dominance, first at Alabama, and now in the NFL, means looking back and asking the question that everyone asks now.
How could a player who was so overwhelming, so covered in the media and so much better than everyone else, be written off as a guy who was best suited to play another position?
For those who only recall Henry’s success at Alabama or in the NFL, rewind the tape back a bit further to his days at Yulee High School. Henry was always better than everyone else on the field from the moment he played his first varsity game until his very last.
“I think we all probably felt at the next level he wouldn’t be as dominant, because people were bigger, faster, stronger there,” said former Fernandina Beach coach Travis Hodge. “But he got bigger, faster and stronger.”
The yardage numbers fell at a staggering pace.
He hit the 6,000 and 7,000-yard barriers as a junior. The odometer rolled on during his senior year … 8,000, 9,000, 10,000, 11,000 and 12,000.
“The first three years it was like the Jackson Five, we had some guys around him …,” Ramsay said. “The last one, it was like Michael Jackson after ‘Thriller.' He was just that good. That’s your guy. You just give him the ball.’”
Henry sailed past Ciatrick Fason’s area rushing record. Then Emmitt Smith’s state high school rushing mark. Some of the best players in the game weren’t safe either. Marcus Dupree. Cedric Benson. Adrian Peterson. Travis Henry. Herschel Walker. Each of those players had stellar high school careers running the ball.
Henry put each of them in the rearview.
“I always talked about lining up on the first play with 13 players and stay that way until they threw a flag on us,” said Hodge when asked if there was a way opposing coaches planned to stop Henry.
“I’m watching film [of Yulee against Gainesville] and there’s this play where he just hurdles somebody. Just jumps over them. I paused it and called my wife in and said, ‘babe, look at this.’ It’s paused and she’s staring at it in awe. I said, ‘he’s not done yet.’ I unfreeze it. He lands and goes 80 yards. How are you going to stop that? To me, that’s where his mindset was; you’re not going to stop him. You saw that. We all saw that. Now everyone else is witnessing that.”
Trinity Christian coach Verlon Dorminey, who is second in area history to Bolles’ Corky Rogers (10) with seven state championships, faced Henry twice and went 1-1 in those games.
Trinity teams were loaded with talented players and it still took everything it had to contain him. Henry had 534 yards and six touchdowns on 73 carries in those games.
“Our plan was, we went small up front and shot gaps to get to him before he got started,” Dorminey said. “Once he got started, look out. He was just fast. Once he got to that second level, he was gone. Just so good. We were just talking about this the other day. We’ve had two Heisman winners play on our field, Timmy [Tebow] and Henry.”
The one player in front of Henry in the recordbooks in high school, Sugar Land, Texas legend Ken Hall, was considered by some to hold the most sacred record in high school football.
Hall’s mark of 11,232 rushing yards had been intact since 1953.
Henry came along and shattered it, rushing for 12,140 yards and 47 consecutive 100-yard rushing games.
That alone should have been enough to make college programs wear out a trail to Yulee and line up to offer the most dominant high school running back ever.
And schools did come.
They wanted Henry, but they wanted him to play on the defensive side of the ball. Ramsay said that for every five schools that offered Henry out of high school, four of them wanted him to switch positions.
“It certainly frustrated him. Because he was so good and worked so hard and wanted that opportunity. That’s where his passion was at, running back. I hated it for him," Ramsay said.
“At the same time, I was also frustrated because, don’t come in here and tell me about my player after watching him for five minutes. I’ll tell you about my player. You want to spend time with him. Coach him. Watch him. Then we can talk. But don’t come in and tell me what my player can and can’t do.”
Henry’s final three school choices, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, were among the only colleges who wanted Henry as a running back.
“That was really it, honestly. I think everyone else saw him at a defensive guy and if he wasn’t willing to move to that position then they were going to go another direction,” Ramsay said. “I think it hurt him. I remember when the recruiting rankings came out and he wasn’t the No. 1 ranked player in the country. I was like, ‘how is this possible?’ He was 77th or something like that.”
Henry committed to Alabama on the afternoon of Sept. 28, 2012.
Six hours later, Henry went out and ran for 362 yards and six touchdowns in a 42-6 blowout of Belle Glade Glades Day in front of a national television audience that night on ESPNU.
The storyline in that game was ripe.
It was a showdown between the two most accomplished running backs in state high school history, Henry and Glades Day’s Kelvin Taylor, the son of former Jaguars back Fred Taylor.
With quick lateral movement and the stature to hit small cracks in the line, Taylor was the prototypical back and far easier to project at the college level than Henry. Coaches and recruiting experts saw players with Taylor’s agility and size and had seen it before. Henry was one-of-a-kind.
Henry didn’t say it audibly in that game, but his play said everything. He was a running back. And prototypes be damned, Henry was going to be one, even if the circle who believed he could was small.
After a Heisman Trophy, a Pro Bowl berth and leading the NFL in rushing, the doubts have faded, doubts that Derrick Henry knew, shouldn’t have been there to begin with.