34 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020
NIn an era of instant highlight videos on
social media, an otherwise forgettable 4-
yard run went viral. Derrick Henry, the
bruising tailback of the Tennessee Ti-
tans, was its star: He lured a 200-pound
cornerback in close, grabbed a hold of his
shoulder, and simply shoved him to the
ground. The whole video clip, from start
to finish, took only a few seconds.
The fact that the run was negated by
offsetting penalties could not have mat-
tered less. King Henry had humiliated
Josh Norman, a former All-Pro, adding
him to a collection of famous defenders
he had destroyed with the most antique
of football moves: the stiff arm.
“You use whatever weapons are at
your disposal,” said Bobby Ramsay, who
in his time as the coach at Yulee High
School in Florida helped Henry perfect
the stiff arm, which was then put to use
as Henry set a national high school
record of 12,124 yards rushing. “For some
guys, it’s the juke, for other guys, it’s a
spin move. Derrick’s is the ability to use
his free hand to keep guys away.”
Norman’s demise is just one of a grow-
ing list of highlights for Henry during the
last three seasons. From a 99-yard run in
2018, to the dominant playoff perform-
ances that took Tennessee to the A.F.C.
championship game last season, to his
264-yard performance in a Week 6 win
over Houston, Henry has made regular
use of a move so old-fashioned that it is
immortalized on the Heisman Trophy —
which Henry won for Alabama in 2015.
The scary thing is, Henry doesn’t just
have one stiff-arm technique. He has
three.
Ramsay, who now coaches at Man-
darin High School in Jacksonville, de-
scribed one of Henry’s stiff arms as a “so-
cial distancing” move, where Henry
leaves his long arms stretched out in ad-
vance of contact, keeping defenders
away. Another is the “it’s time to go to
bed, son” move, where a defender makes
the mistake of going for Henry’s waist,
only to have Henry push down on the de-
fender’s helmet, like a father patting his
son’s head.
For the Norman play, Henry employed
what Ramsay called the “barroom get
the heck away from me” move. It’s a ver-
sion of the stiff arm reserved for when a
defender is already in proximity, and it is
not nearly as easy as Henry makes it
look.
Ryan Tannehill, the Titans’ quarter-
back, saw the play unfold from only a few
yards away, which prompted him to use
some salty language on the field. He
marveled at Henry’s strength even after
his team’s 42-16 win over Buffalo.
“That was probably one of the mean-
est stiff arms I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“No doubt.”
Henry tossed aside the attention as
easily as he dispatched Norman.
“I’ve been doing too many curls,” he
said with a smile. “I’ve gotta lay off the
arms.”
Jokes aside, the stiff arm, which dates
to football’s earliest days, has endured,
with Jim Brown giving way to Walter
Payton and so many others. Players like
Garrison Hearst and Marshawn Lynch
have bowled their way onto stiff-arm
highlight videos that chew up clicks on
YouTube.
While Henry’s bruising style is not
particularly fashionable in today’s
N.F.L., the stiff arm can be almost a cheat
code for players who perfect it. The
league’s rules allow for a runner to push
a defender’s helmet without being called
for a face-mask penalty, provided the
contact is deemed incidental.
The most famous example of the move
is probably Ed Smith’s pose on the tro-
phy that bears John Heisman’s name,
but few stiff arms in the N.F.L. can match
the stakes, and the payoff, of the one
thrown by John Riggins in the Super
Bowl that followed the 1982 season.
With Washington behind by 17-13 in
the fourth quarter, Riggins, on 4th-and-1,
broke around the left side and used his
right arm to shed Dolphins cornerback
Don McNeal. He then charged 43 yards
into the end zone for the go-ahead touch-
down.
Riggins said he did not practice the
stiff arm or develop any special tech-
niques for it. “Basically, everything I did
was instinctual,” he said in a telephone
interview. “If someone was trying to
grab you, you try to fend them off.”
On his famous Super Bowl run, Rig-
gins credits his teammates and a bit of
luck. Before the snap, tight end Clint Di-
dier went in motion to the right, then
headed back to the left to block for Rig-
gins. McNeal followed Didier in both di-
rections but slipped when he reversed
course.
“That’s what kept him a hundredth of a
second away from getting a bigger piece
of me,” Riggins said. “It would have been
shame on me if I didn’t break that tackle.”
Whether it’s Riggins or Henry, a good
stiff arm can make a player stand out in
any era. But with teams working so hard
to emphasize the passing game, and with
smaller, more versatile running backs in
fashion, Henry, who embraces his size
rather than trying to adapt to the style of
smaller runners, has become the ulti-
mate throwback. Standing 6 feet 3 inches
and weighing 247 pounds, he is the larg-
est starting running back in the N.F.L.
Ezekiel Elliott of the Dallas Cowboys,
who also entered the league in 2016, is
three inches shorter and 20 pounds
lighter. The Kansas City Chiefs rookie
Clyde Edwards-Helaire is listed at just 5
feet 7 inches and weighs 207 pounds.
In addition to his unusual height,
Henry has long arms. Measured at 33
inches before the N.F.L. draft in 2016, he
has a longer reach than all but three
draft-eligible running backs measured in
the last five seasons.
That size was not always seen as an
advantage. Ramsay said many recruit-
ers dismissed Henry’s obvious talents in
high school because they felt he was too
big, or “ran tall” in football parlance.
They were all looking for running backs
with a lower center of gravity.
But Henry is extremely fast for his size
— he ran 4.54 seconds in the 40-yard
dash — and uses his height and strength
to break tackles and get into the defen-
sive backfield. He averaged 5.1 yards a
carry last season, when he ran for a
league-leading 1,540 yards and 16 touch-
downs. This year, he is averaging 4.8
yards a carry, but is also carrying the ball
more — 24.6 times a game, up from 20.2
times a game last season.
Henry can effectively stiff-arm an op-
ponent with either arm — yet another
thing that sets him apart — and any op-
ponent who decides to go after his legs
won’t find that much easier.
“You hear people say, ‘defenders
should just go low,’ ” said Dave Anderson,
a former N.F.L. wide receiver and the
chief executive of BreakAway Data, an
athlete development company. “The
problem is defenders can’t really do that
when they are running full speed on an
angle, in the running back’s vision and
are outweighed by 50 pounds. All of
those really mess with a defender’s tim-
ing.”
Anderson equated attempting to time
a tackle on a player of Henry’s size and
speed to “trying to jump in a car going 20
miles per hour.”
None of this is new for Henry, who has
used his height, weight and leverage to
great effect since at least the ninth grade.
Ramsay recognized that Henry, who was
over 6 feet tall in high school, was not a
slashing runner like Barry Sanders. Be-
cause of his height advantage, lowering
his shoulder into a shorter defender’s
chest would have slowed him down. So
Ramsay let Henry break tackles with his
bulk and use his speed to run away from
pursuers.
“I’ve been doing it since I was a kid,
since I’ve been playing football, and it
just came natural to me because I have
long arms,” Henry said in September. “So
that’s the first thing I use to break a
tackle or get away from the defender.”
In the game in which he set the na-
tional high school rushing record, Henry
carried the ball 58 times for 482 yards
and 6 touchdowns. That performance
was typical of a senior year in which he
scored 55 touchdowns, even as some de-
fenses put as many as 10 players on the
line of scrimmage. “There wasn’t any se-
cret what we were trying to do,” Ramsay
said.
There still isn’t. While Tannehill has
shown an ability to stretch the field with
the passing game, Tennessee runs its of-
fense through Henry. And no matter how
much teams try to adjust, Henry seems
to find ways to make it work. Henry will
have that dominance tested on Sunday,
when his 5-0 Titans face the 5-0 Pitts-
burgh Steelers, a team that features the
most efficient run defense in the N.F.L.
But if there is a player who can make
things work against just about any de-
fense, it’s Henry.
And as his star continues to rise,
Henry can count among his admirers
someone who happens to be an icon of
the Titans franchise from its days as the
Houston Oilers, and who thinks Henry
doesn’t use the stiff arm nearly enough.
“How in the hell you don’t use that
stiff-arm more?” Earl Campbell asked
Henry during a visit with the team last
year. “Put that bone on them. Let them
know you got it.”The Social Distancing.
Henry often runs with
an arm stretched in
front of him, preventing
defenders from getting
close.The Barroom Get the
Heck Away From Me.
In a variation of a more
typical stiff arm, Henry
draws a defender in
before using his
upper-body strength to
send him flying.The It’s Time to
Go to Bed, Son.
When defenders try
to go low, Henry
pushes down on their
helmet, like a father
patting his son’s
head.The New-Age N.F.L. Gets
A Taste of the Old-School Stiff Arm
Derrick Henry, the Titans’ bruising
running back, perfects a technique
that harkens to football’s early days.
By KEN BELSONILLUSTRATIONS BY IVETA KARPATHYOVA; PHOTO REFERENCES BY ADAM BETTCHER, WESLEY HITT AND BRETT CARLSEN/GETTY IMAGES.