Nick Saban remembers the first time he laid eyes on him. This high-school player was the largest person on the field and somehow the fastest. Even stranger was the position he was playing.
Which was when one of the greatest college football coaches of all time knew he had never seen anyone like Derrick Henry. “You don’t think of guys being his size and being running backs,” Saban says.
Henry played for Saban at Alabama and now stars for the Tennessee Titans, who he has led to this AFC Championship against the Kansas City Chiefs by unceremoniously trampling enormous men, known as NFL defensive players, over and over again.
Henry’s run is nothing short of historic: He’s the first-ever player to run for at least 180 yards in three consecutive games. No player has ever compiled as many rushing yards over an eight-game span. He utterly flattened the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens, in back-to-back playoff upsets, as if they were a bunch of high-schoolers.
There’s one group of people who regrettably know this exact feeling: anyone who had to reckon with playing Henry at Yulee High School in Florida, outside of Jacksonville. Almost every NFL star was an even bigger high-school star, but within this tiny sliver of outliers, even Henry was an anomaly. At Yulee, he ran for 12,124 yards in four years, breaking the national high-school rushing record that had stood for more than a half-century. Back then, the 6-foot-3 and 247-pound Henry wasn’t much smaller, and he formulated the recognizable blueprint the sixth-seeded Titans are riding on an unlikely playoff run.
Give Henry the ball. And watch him bulldoze people.
By the time Henry was a high-school senior, he was already a local legend, and that started to become quite problematic for his coach. Bobby Ramsey would dial up other local schools to schedule games, and some were all too aware of this player who was quicker than their wide receivers and bigger than their offensive linemen.
Some opposing coaches suddenly decided Yulee was too far away to schedule. Others mysteriously declared any date Ramsey suggested wouldn’t work. “It was like calling and trying to sell cancer,” Ramsey says.
Ryan Smith probably wishes he came up with an excuse to cancel his team’s game. Smith was the coach of the nearby Taylor County Bulldogs, and his team did a couple things well the night they played Yulee. The Bulldogs kept the game close and intercepted Yulee’s quarterback both times he threw the ball.
But that meant one thing. Yulee just kept on handing it to Henry. When the game was over, Henry had 57 carries for 485 yards in a 41-26 win. “I’d always say, ‘One man in football can’t beat you,’” Smith said. “I was wrong.”
Ramsey used to joke that Henry carried the ball so often he was worried that child protective services would come for him. But if Ramsey tried to lighten Henry’s workload, he faced the wrath of an even higher authority. That was Derrick Henry.
Ramsey remembers giving Henry a practice off after a game and insisting that Henry wear street clothes to sit the entire session out. Briefly, Ramsey turned his attention away only to look back and see Henry on the field in pads. “I was bored,” Henry told him afterward.
The only thing less clear than why Henry ran the ball so much in high school—he had 462 carries for 4,261 yards as a senior—is why he didn’t run it even more. He rushed for more yards in two games than the team passed for the entire season. He accounted for 79% of Yulee’s yards from scrimmage as a senior, highlighted by a 510-yard performance. For good measure, he also threw a touchdown on his only pass of the year.
Opposing coaches said the only hope for tackling him was having multiple players hit him—at his ankles, waist and chest—before he could get fully going. They’d send everyone after him, and even that didn’t get it done most of the time. Opposing coaches saw their players calculate the severe consequences of trying to tackle him.
“This kid’s thinking, ‘I have a date with my girlfriend tomorrow. That’s more important than tackling Derrick Henry right now,’” says Travis Hodge, the coach of Fernandina Beach. “You see NFL guys making that decision right now.”
The No. 1 seed Baltimore Ravens essentially took this same high-school approach against Henry. They put at least eight defenders in the box on 63% of his carries—way up from the normal rate of 37% he has faced. This had little effect. He finished with 30 carries for 195 yards, pulling off one of the biggest upsets of the postseason and leaving a trail of defenders who either refused or failed to tackle him.
“It’s the same exact thing, which is absolutely ridiculous because in high school he’s playing a bunch of guys coming off puberty,” said Reagan Wright, who played against him at West Nassau high school.
“He never got tackled by one guy,” adds Zack Camp, his high-school teammate.
The Ravens game exemplified his unusual capacities. Only one running back tested at the combine in the last two decades has been as tall and heavy as him, but he’s also absurdly fast: on his 66-yard run against Baltimore, he reached 20.7 mph, according to Zebra Technologies, which provides the NFL’s Next Gen Stats. That’s the sixth time he has reached at least 20 mph as a ball carrier this year, the second most in the NFL.
Pete Walker had some choice words for his Glades Day players when they let Henry run for 362 yards in a similar type of performance. Later, Walker regretted every word when, a year later, he turned on his television and saw Alabama playing Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl and saw a freshman running the ball eight times for 100 yards against one of the best college football teams in the entire country. “I’m thinking, ‘My god, we’re average high school kids, and I’m chewing them out for not tackling Derrick Henry,’ ” Walker said.
Henry went on to play three seasons at Alabama, which featured Henry at his preferred position when other schools and analysts predicted, now laughably, that he’d have to change roles because of his body type. “A lot of people really questioned if he could really play running back,” Saban says.
Henry won the Heisman Trophy as a junior when he ran for 2,219 yards en route to a national championship. The Titans took him in the second round of the draft and coaches in the area still lament that the nearby Jacksonville Jaguars passed on him. (Henry ran for a career-high 238 yards against them last year.)
Reagan Wright still tells friends about the horrors of going up against Henry. Wright mainly played quarterback and only sparingly checked in on defense. Then his coach barked at him to sub in at cornerback. Naturally, Henry came barreling at him on the very next play.
That’s when, Wright swears, the unthinkable happened. He tackled Derrick Henry.
“I don’t have any pictures,” he says. “People are just going to have to trust me.”
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Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
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