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Feature: Having a Moment

Keyvone Lee rose to the occasion as a true freshman running back pressed into emergency duty last year. He's hoping to fare even better this fall

Keyvone Lee was a little bit nervous but mostly just excited when he called his mother the night before Penn State’s game against Michigan last November to deliver the news that he was probably going to be making his first college start. “Turn on the TV,” he told her. “Tell everybody.”

Lee’s mother, Eugenia Broxton, was a bit more subdued. Lee sensed that she was trying not to let her own excitement show, and to hear him tell it, she did an excellent job. “She was like, ‘We’ll see,’” he recalled. “That’s all she kept saying, ‘We’ll see.’”

Twenty-four hours later, the two had reversed roles. Lee not only started against the Wolverines, he pounded them. He rushed for 134 yards, the most by a Penn State freshman since Saquon Barkley finished with 194 against Ohio State in 2015, and his effort helped lead the Nittany Lions to a 27-17 victory, their first win of the season and their first in Ann Arbor since Lee was in grade school. It was a celebratory moment for a team that hadn’t had much to celebrate to that point in the season, and to Lee, the victory overshadowed his individual accomplishments by a wide margin.

“It was my first college win,” he said. “It was my first experience in a locker room celebrating, partying, turning it up. I was more happy about that than my performance. Because, I mean, I’ve always been good at football. I’ve had good games. I was kind of used to my performance.”

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Keyvone Lee rushed for 134 yards against Michigan, helping the Lions win in Ann Arbor for the first time in over a decade.
Keyvone Lee rushed for 134 yards against Michigan, helping the Lions win in Ann Arbor for the first time in over a decade.

His mother may have been used to it, too. But after watching Lee drag would-be tacklers around the Big House all afternoon, Broxton could hardly contain her excitement. “She was going crazy,” Lee said, smiling as he recalled her reaction. “Twitter, Facebook. I was like, Mom, chill.”

Broxton had every reason to be excited. In fact, her response echoed that of the many Penn State fans who were waiting for something to feel good about last season and found it in Lee’s emergence as a powerhouse running back with the potential to help fuel a potent Nittany Lion rushing attack for the next few years.

Lee started three of Penn State’s last four games and finished his debut season as the team’s leading rusher, totaling 438 yards and four touchdowns on 89 carries while adding 12 catches for 66 yards.

One of the reasons he was able to do all that was his talent for gaining yards after contact. Listed at 6-foot-0, 230 pounds last season, he showed that he’s the kind of runner who can move piles. When James Franklin was asked for an assessment last year of Lee’s running style, he focused on the hidden yards that the freshman was able to pick up just by falling forward when he’s dragged down.

“That’s something that a lot of times goes unnoticed,” Franklin said, “but when you can always fall forward, you’re talking about another yard-and-a-half or two yards on every run.”

Lee said he started to develop his powerful running style early in his high school career at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg, Fla. “I’ve always been tough,” he said. “I always want to make people feel it. That’s how it came. I would say 10th grade was when I realized that I could do that. That was my style. That’s me.”

Penn State fans got to see that power on display a lot earlier than expected. Lee arrived on campus last July and went into his freshman season expecting to play sparingly. He figured the coaches would give him a chance at some point to show what he could do, especially since the season didn’t count against anyone’s eligibility. But with Journey Brown, Noah Cain and Devyn Ford ahead of him, and fellow Floridian Caziah Holmes joining him in the Class of 2020, Lee didn’t think he was going to get a whole lot of carries.

He thought wrong. Brown saw his career end when he was diagnosed with a heart ailment, and Cain went down with an injury on Penn State’s first offensive series of the season at Indiana. Players learned at halftime in Bloomington that Cain was done for the afternoon. What they didn’t know at the time, but would soon find out, was that he was also done for the season.

The loss of Brown and Cain propelled Ford to the starting lineup, but Lee understood that his outlook had changed, too. “Devyn can’t play all the snaps – that’s how I was looking at it,” he said. “I was a little nervous. But at the same time, it’s just football, so I wasn’t too nervous.”

Running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider prefers to keep newcomers shielded from that kind of pressure, partly because they need time to acclimate to college life, but also because players often assume they’ll be able to ease into prominent roles and don’t always respond well when it doesn’t work out that way.

Running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider works with Keyvone Lee on the practice field.
Running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider works with Keyvone Lee on the practice field.

“They’re all highly recruited and they think it’s going to be easy,” Seider said. “You come into a room where there are some athletes. You weren’t expecting to play, and all of a sudden your number is called. Now, not only do you have to play, but you have to be the guy.”

That’s what happened to Penn State’s freshman running backs last year. But as it turned out, they were ready for their moment, and that was because they had bought into another of Seider’s beliefs: Everyone needs to be prepared for everything at all times. Said Lee, “He just always told all of us to be ready. You never know what’s going to happen. I was prepared on day one, even if I wasn’t going to play.”

Lee is even better prepared going into his sophomore season. He’s a little bit lighter than last year, and a little bit faster, too. Although he’s currently listed at 220 pounds on the PSU roster, he said his true weight as of early June was closer to 228, a few pounds less than his listed weight as a freshman. Also, after running a 4.6-second 40-yard dash last year, he said his fastest time this past spring was a 4.49.

Seider attributed those improvements to Lee’s performance in Penn State’s off-season program. “He’s got more lean mass on him because of the weightlifting, the winter conditioning,” Seider said.

Aside from the physical development, Lee said his top priority this off-season has been to improve as a blocker. When he works out on his own, the first thing he does is hit the blocking sled.

While Lee may have led the team in rushing last year, the Nittany Lions also return their second-leading rusher from the 2019 season in Cain, as well as Ford and Holmes, the latter having come on strong late last year with 77 yards and two touchdowns in the season finale against Illinois. The Lions also have an intriguing newcomer in John Lovett, a Baylor transfer who has more career rushing yards (1,803) than the other four scholarship running backs put together (1,689).

Given the wealth of talent Penn State has amassed, Lee said he could envision the workload being split equitably this coming fall. “There’s a lot of competition,” he said. “Everybody is coming to work. We’re competing. Every day we’re competing, all of us. It’s going to be a tough decision. We’re making it hard for Coach to decide.”

With so many variables in play, so many qualified contenders for the starting job, that decision may not be known until Penn State’s offense trots onto the field for the first time on Sept. 4 at Wisconsin. At this point in the off-season, you could make a plausible case for nearly anyone.

So, how does Lee fit into the mix after a season in which he “handled the moments pretty well for a true freshman” by Franklin’s reckoning?

We’ll see.


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