Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1276571
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 talk- ing about it the whole week, be- cause 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 foot- ball are. It all ties together – what we preach, what we do, how I feel about my- self and how I feel about the program." A year ago, Brown was coming off a red- shirt 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 con- tenders vying for carries, including two true freshmen, and Brown's role in the backfield was unclear. So Seider chal- lenged 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 men- tal approach. He had never lacked confi- dence, but he had a tendency to get sidetracked, allowing personal and aca- demic 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 be- came 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 No- vember, 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 com- fortable 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 his redshirt junior season 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. Brown said he doesn't have a lot of spe- cific goals heading into what could be his >> TROPHY GAME Brown was named offen- sive MVP of the Cotton Bowl after breaking a Penn State postseason record by aver- aging 12.6 yards per carry. Photo by Steve Manuel