#UsSportNews You might be able to tackle Derrick Henry. But you're not going to like it.
You wince for them already, the breakable souls for the Kansas City Chiefs who have to try to tackle Derrick Henry. The most imposing force left in these NFL playoffs is Henry when he dents a line. By his fourth step, the 6-foot-3, 247-pound Tennessee Titans running back is moving at an estimated 21 miles per hour. The defenders who meet that will be promptly and forcibly reminded of what Jim Brown once said: “Make sure when anyone tackles you, he remembers how much it hurts.”
Chiefs safety Tyrann Mathieu remembers. He tackled Henry earlier this season, and thought he’d broken his jaw. He told CBS it was like hitting solid rock. Baltimore Ravens All-Pro cornerback Marlon Humphrey felt Henry, in their upset loss to the Titans in the AFC divisional round last week. He recommends that anyone who wants to try it go to the weight room and “get an extra lift in.”
So far, absolutely no one has found a way to slow down Henry’s demolishing forward tilt, much less stop him. He enters the AFC championship game with the momentum of a runaway bus, having run for more than 180 yards in three straight games, the first man in NFL history to do so. Hit him high? He gets you with that stiff arm, long and forceful as a horseman’s lance, such as the one he gave Earl Thomas of the Ravens, saying, “Good to see you, Earl, let’s do this again,” before he left him spinning in the turf. Or, sometimes he’ll just shoulder three or four guys and “carry you for about five more yards,” says Chiefs linebacker Anthony Hitchens, before he sheds you and leaves you crumpled on the field like balls of lint.
“He’s like one of those guys the kids create on Madden,” Ravens defensive coordinator Wink Martindale said. “You shouldn’t be able to be that big and run like he does.”
All things considered, the Chiefs say they have decided to “kill the engine” that is Henry by going low. “You’ve just got to take his legs out,” Hitchens says, “hit him in his thighs and chop him down.”
The problem with that, Hitchens points out, is that those thighs are as heavy as cannonballs. Another problem is Henry’s offensive linemen, a “mean and nasty” crew according to Mathieu, who make it hard to get at his legs. And then there is the fact that Henry simply likes to hit — according to Pro Football Focus, almost 85 percent of his yardage comes after contact.
“We want it gritty,” Henry said after dispatching the Patriots. “We want it dirty.”
Maybe the best idea for how to bring down Henry came from cornerback Vernon Hargreaves III, back when he was in college at Florida and Henry was Alabama’s Heisman Trophy winner.
“Just hold on,” Hargreaves said then, “and wait for the team to get there.”
Henry’s development into the X-factor this postseason has laid waste to defensive strategy. There is nothing very cute about what the Henry and the Titans do to defenders. They just destroy your will. Back in Week 10, when the Titans beat the Chiefs, 35-32, behind 188 yards from Henry, Coach Mike Vrabel described their end-game plan. It was simply this: “pound out 10-, 11-, 12-yard runs, and then ultimately watch those guys leave the game, or be on a knee, or be tired, or be banged up, and then walk into the end zone,” Vrabel said.
You can see the result of all that repetitive battering, how a team breaks, in Henry’s numbers. He averages a whomping 6.6 yards per carry in the third quarter of games.
“Second-half football, he takes off,” Mathieu says. “So we got to be well-rested, hydrated in order to kind of finish the game, try to compete against him and slow him down when it matters the most in the fourth quarter — four-minute drives, six-minute drives, seven minutes left.”
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