Just getting warmed up

The following story appears in Blue White Illustrated's Penn State preseason magazine. It is on newsstands now and has been mailed to our print subscribers.

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There’s a famous scene in one of the “Matrix” sequels in which the movies’ hero, Neo, is confronted by his nemesis, Agent Smith, in a vacant plaza at the foot of some high-rise apartment buildings. Because the whole thing is actually part of an elaborate computer simulation, Agent Smith is able to duplicate himself at will. Soon there are a couple of Agent Smiths, then a dozen, then a hundred. They come rushing at Neo in waves, but he fends them all off with a series of absurdly athletic self-defense moves, flinging some out of his way, knocking others to the ground like bowling pins and leaving the rest grasping at air. By the end of the scene, he’s made his escape, ascending into the stratosphere superhero-style as the Agent Smiths look at each other perplexed, wondering what hit them.

That’s pretty much how the Cotton Bowl went for Journey Brown last December. The speedy redshirt sophomore absolutely wrecked Memphis, rushing for 202 yards and averaging 12.6 yards per carry in Penn State’s 53-39 victory. No Nittany Lion running back had ever done better in a postseason game, and there have been some pretty good Nittany Lion running backs over the years. But it wasn’t just the numbers that impressed; it was the way in which Brown compiled them. Tacklers just sort of bounced off him. When they got in his way, he shrugged them off, or stiff-armed them, or dragged them forward for extra yardage. And when they didn’t get in his way, when he managed to find some open field, he was uncatchable.

One carry in particular seemed to sum up Brown’s afternoon. After taking the handoff deep in the backfield, he burst through a hole that guard Steven Gonzalez and center Michal Menet had opened up, slipped out of an attempted tackle just beyond the line of scrimmage, careened off of a second tackler a few yards later, pushed away a third tackler who had latched onto his left arm and was trying to drag him to the turf, then carried a fourth tackler into the end zone after the desperate Tiger defender had jumped on his back at the 4-yard line.

Brown’s 32-yard touchdown run early in the first quarter set the tone for the rest of the game, and it may also have done something even more significant: Coming on the heels of a regular-season surge in which he lit up Minnesota, Indiana, Rutgers and even Ohio State for a couple of quarters, the run may have set the tone for the rest of his football career, be it at Penn State or onto the next level.

“You feel like he can do it against anybody,” running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider said this spring. “In the Minnesota game, he played his tail off. And then what he did at Ohio State in the second half was probably as impressive as anybody in the country. I’ll say this: In the last four or five games – and I know I’m biased – I thought Journey Brown was playing as good as any running back in the country. He’s got freakish athletic ability and strength that he finally started tapping into.”

When he came to University Park in the Class of 2017, Brown was known best as a record-breaking high school sprinter. Despite compiling eye-popping numbers as a Wing-T tailback at Meadville (Pa.) High, he was regarded by the recruiting experts as a bit of a reach, a prospect who would need to add a few more tools to his toolkit if he were going to succeed at a Power Five school. He wasn’t just going to blaze past would-be tacklers at college football’s highest level.

As the Cotton Bowl showed, Brown has acquired those tools. He has said that he wants to be a “Swiss army knife” – the type of running back who can run inside and outside the tackle box and catch passes, too. Against the Tigers, with the help of a dominant performance by Penn State’s offensive line, he did all that and more.

“I feel like that was me proving that this was Big Ten football, this was Penn State-standard football,” Brown said. “Coach [Tyler] Bowen was talking about it the whole week, because he was [interim] OC for the Cotton Bowl: This is going to be a dictatorship. We’re going to move the ball, we’re going to do what we want because it’s our game. I feel like that run was showing not only what I could do, my abilities, that I’m not a one-dimensional back, but what Penn State stands for. We come out there and play smash mouth football. We’ll sling the ball on you and we’ll hopefully run it down your throat. It doesn’t matter. That’s just how Penn State-standard football and Big Ten football are. It all ties together – what we preach, what we do, how I feel about myself and how I feel about the program.”

A year ago, Brown was coming off a redshirt freshman season in which he had carried only eight times for 44 yards. Penn State had a vacancy at running back with Miles Sanders having left early for the NFL, but there were three other contenders vying for carries, including two true freshmen, and Brown’s role in the backfield was unclear. So Seider challenged him.

“He asked me if I’m comfortable being a backseat driver,” Brown recalled. “Am I comfortable being a backup? He asked me if I was ever going to take that step to be a star, if I was ever going to put myself in that driver’s seat. At the time, I wasn’t playing a lot. There’s nobody harder on me than I am. I felt like I was putting too much stress on myself.”

Brown decided he needed a better mental approach. He had never lacked confidence, but he had a tendency to get sidetracked, allowing personal and academic matters to affect how he prepared for games. “I had a lot of outside noise,” he said. So he focused on focusing. When he was in the football complex, he was locked in on football. He had previously studied film out of a sense of obligation, but now he was watching with an eye for detail, noticing tendencies in defenders that he knew he could exploit.

The benefits of that approach soon became evident. Against Pitt last September, he took over the starting position and broke loose on an 85-yard run. When Penn State’s other breakout running back, freshman Noah Cain, got hurt at Michigan State in early October, Brown took charge of the backfield. Starting with a 124-yard outburst against Minnesota in early November, he topped 100 yards in four of Penn State’s final five games.

Brown said that his emphasis on film study made a huge difference toward the end of the season. “When you get comfortable with that type of stuff, the game moves slow for you,” he said. “For me, it started moving slow. That’s where my confidence came in, and my abilities started showing a little bit, and my strength and my speed. I had nothing to worry about except getting the ball and doing what comes naturally to me.”

So now Brown heads into the unknown, like the rest of the Nittany Lions awaiting the formulation of a "spring" season following the cancelation of all fall sports in the Big Ten in August. Whether the Big Ten plays or not, Brown will have a decision to make between returning for his redshirt junior season or to attempt to pursue a career in the NFL.

Certainly, he will make those decisions with plenty of momentum. He came out of winter workouts having added about 10 pounds and didn’t lose much of that weight during quarantine. At 5-foot-11, he believes he can carry about 225 pounds this season without sacrificing any of his speed. He ran a 4.29-second 40-yard dash when he was carrying 217 pounds, so there’s no reason to doubt that he can find the right balance between speed and power. “If I put on any more weight, it’ll keep getting lower,” he laughed.

Should he play another season with Penn State, Brown said he doesn’t have a lot of specific goals heading into what could be his final season as a Nittany Lion. He wants to top 1,000 yards, something he’s yet to do in his career after finishing last season with 890. But that’s going to be especially difficult in a truncated season, and anyway, he sees statistics and postseason honors as distractions. Said Brown, “If you pay attention to those things, that’s going to take a lot of energy, and you’re going to put a lot of stress on yourself.”

Instead, he’s focused on adding more facets to his game, particularly as a pass-catcher. He’s looking to emulate NFL standouts like Alvin Kamara of New Orleans, Christian McCaffrey of Carolina, and his former Penn State teammates Sanders and Saquon Barkley. The common denominator that links all of those players is that they’re all-purpose running backs. Brown, who caught 15 passes for 137 yards last season, sees himself that way, too.

“I feel like I’m a running back who can do all the things,” he said. “I can juke you, I can run you over, I can outrun you. I want to become like Alvin Kamara, or how Saquon and Miles are right now. They can catch the ball in the backfield, or you can split them out. I’ve been working on my hand-eye coordination – how to catch the ball, extending my arms, running receiver routes. In basketball, I like how LeBron can do everything: play defense, play offense, shoot the ball, pass it. I want to be that as a running back. I’m just working on the little things, the little details. I’m watching film, watching the guys who I aspire to shape my game around. And when I apply it to myself, I make it my own so that I can stay original to being Journey Brown.”

Nothing would please Seider more than to see that evolution continue. Brown, he said, is “doing stuff that’s amazing to see. I thought the last five games, he was playing as good as Miles played the year before. That’s no knock on Miles. The way he was making safeties miss, that was impressive. You don’t [see players] with that gift every day. And I think he’s adding to it. I don’t think he’s satisfied. I think he’s hungry because now he’s gotten a taste of it. He realizes how good he can be going forward.”

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