Blue White Illustrated

efore Journey Brown arrived at Penn State for his true freshman year, his eyes were opened by a recruiting visit. Having verbally committed on the spot a week earlier, Brown, the lone running back in the Nittany Lions' Class of 2017, took his official visit to University Park the weekend of Jan. 20. At some point during the visit, he headed off with Charles Huff, the team's running backs coach at the time, for some film study. Pulling up plays from offensive coordina- tor Joe Moorhead's system, Huff engaged Brown on the intricacies of some of the Nittany Lions' running plays. "I'm sitting there like, 'Yeah, yeah. I got you. I got you,' " Brown recalled. "And I had no idea what he was talking about. He was speaking a different language, like Spanish to me." Just a few months earlier, Brown had finished his fourth season of football in head coach Ray Collins' wing-T offense at Meadville High School in northwestern Pennsylvania. He was a first-team Class 5A All-State selection as a senior with 2,791 rushing yards and 51 total touch- downs, helping lead the Bulldogs to the PIAA quarterfinals before losing to West Allegheny. A year earlier, he had set a Pennsylvania single-game rushing record with a 722-yard, 10-touchdown per- formance, a feat likely to follow Brown through the rest of his playing career. But none of it truly prepared him for the transition he quickly realized he would have to make now that he was headed to the college level. Returning home from the visit, Brown attempted to explain to his mother, Buffy, the concepts as Huff had explained them to him. It was a little test of his compre- hension and recollection, Brown thought, but the information just wasn't sticking. So when he finally arrived on Penn State's campus in June 2017, he wasn't any closer to where he wanted to be. "I just didn't understand. I just didn't get the plays," he said. "When I was in high school, we knew our plays by name. So the coach would tell the receiver, the receiver would run it in, and he would say the play. The signals and formations and all that stuff – I had never, ever seen something like that. I never understood how they even called plays in college. I thought the boards to cover up the signalers from the cameras were the plays. It was just a whole or- deal when I first got up here." That ordeal now feels like a lifetime ago to Brown and to the Nittany Lion football pro- gram that helped usher him into the current phase of his college career. Beginning his redshirt sophomore season listed as a co-starter at running back with Ricky Slade, Brown ap- peared in each of the Nittany Lions' 12 games during the 2019 regular season. Facing Idaho in the team's opener, he cashed in with a pair of rushing touchdowns on five carries. Against Pitt, he topped the 100- yard milestone for the first time in his ca- reer on just 10 carries. In the second half of the season, with Slade seeing less ac- tion and true freshman Noah Cain side- lined due to an injury, Brown seized his opportunity, cracking the century mark three times in Penn State's last four games. None of those performances were more impactful than his 103 yards and three scores on just 16 attempts in a slug- gish 27-6 win against Rutgers on Nov. 30 at Beaver Stadium. With those performances, Brown pro- pelled himself to the top of Penn State's POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT Emboldened by his recent successes, sophomore RB Journey Brown brings a newfound confidence to his starring role in the Penn State backfield | B P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >>

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