Every Penn State football player has been though a lengthy and frequently tedious off-season, but no one has had a longer layoff than Juice Scruggs. In addition to waiting out the season’s delay like everyone else in the Big Ten, the redshirt sophomore center missed the 2019 campaign because of a back injury he sustained in a car accident the previous spring. As the Nittany Lions prepare for their late-October debut, he’s only now getting back in action.
“It’s going on two years since I played actual football,” Scruggs said Friday afternoon. “When the news came out [in August] that the season was getting postponed or canceled or whatever you want to call it, it was a letdown. But at the same time, in my head, it was more time for me to recover and gain more strength. Now that the season is [happening], I’m super eager to get out there and show people. I know that a lot of people haven’t seen me play at all, so I just want to show people what I can do.”
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The 6-foot-3, 281-pound Scruggs has been seeing practice time at center and guard and was listed behind Michal Menet as the Lions’ second-team center on the extremely tentative depth chart that the coaching staff released in April. He’s not sure how many snaps he can expect to get this fall but wants to be prepared for whatever the coaching staff has in store for him. “My goal,” he said, “is that whenever my number gets called, I’m going to be ready.”
Scruggs came to Penn State in 2018 as a four-star prospect out of Erie Cathedral Prep. He seemed to be on the fast track during that first season on campus. While he played in only one game that fall, he shared the Scout Team Offensive Player of the Year honors with Will Levis and Charlie Shuman and headed into the off-season with hopes of advancing up the depth chart. But the accident left him in a back brace for months, and forced him to sit out both spring practice and what would have been his redshirt freshman season.
Scruggs admits that he had doubts initially about whether he was going to be able to play football again. “Anytime you have an injury like that, doubts are going to come across your head,” he said. “But at the same time, I just kept pushing. I kept faith. I knew that hard times don’t last forever, that I was going to get over it.
“As soon as I got back here, my first lift, it wasn’t even a lift. I was barely doing anything. I was my first workout with [Dwight Galt]. … That workout showed me, you’ve got a long way to go. But I was ready for the long road.”
That road has not been easy. Scruggs has learned that practicing and working out the way he did before the injury. These days, he takes great care to stretch his hips, his legs, his hamstrings, knowing that those muscles will affect how his back feels. Even with all that extra work, there are difficulties.
“My body is not the same as everybody else’s,” he said. “Some days I might not have to do anything, but other days I might have to be in the ice tub multiple times. I know my body, and I know it’s different now and I have to be aware.”
There was some trepidation when he returned to practice; Scruggs didn’t know how his body would react to the first collision.
As it turned out, that collision came on an ordinary pass block. It was just another play for Judge Culpepper, the Penn State defensive linemen against whom Scruggs was engaged. But it was a big moment for the young offensive lineman. “When it came, in my head I’m thinking to myself, is it going to be different?” Scruggs said. “But after that first hit, it was back to normal, it was football. After that hit, I was like, yeah, I’m good to go.”
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