Blue White Illustrated

HAVING A MOMENT Keyvone Lee rose to the occasion as a true freshman RB pressed into emergency duty last year. He's hoping to fare even better this fall eyvone Lee was a little bit nervous but mostly just excited when he called his mother the night before Penn State's game against Michigan last November to deliver the news that he was probably going to be mak- ing his first college start. "Turn on the TV," he told her. "Tell everybody." Lee's mother, Eugenia Broxton, was a bit more subdued. Lee sensed that she was trying not to let her own excite- ment show, and to hear him tell it, she did an excellent job. "She was like, 'We'll see,' " he recalled. "That's all she kept saying, 'We'll see.'" Twenty-four hours later, the two had reversed roles. Lee not only started against the Wolverines, he pounded them. He rushed for 134 yards, the most by a Penn State freshman since Saquon Barkley finished with 194 against Ohio State in 2015, and his effort helped lead the Nittany Lions to a 27- 17 victory, their first win of the season and their first in Ann Arbor since Lee was in grade school. It was a celebratory moment for a team that hadn't had much to celebrate to that point in the season, and to Lee, the victory overshad- owed his individual accomplishments by a wide margin. "It was my first college win," he said. "It was my first ex- perience in a locker room celebrating, partying, turning it up. I was more happy about that than my performance. Because, I mean, I've always been good at football. I've had good games. I was kind of used to my performance." His mother may have been used to it, too. But after watch- ing Lee drag would-be tacklers around the Big House all af- ternoon, Broxton could hardly contain her excitement. "She was going crazy," Lee said, smiling as he recalled her reaction. "Twitter, Facebook. I was like, Mom, chill." Broxton had every reason to be excited. In fact, her response echoed that of the many Penn State fans who were waiting for something to feel good about last season and found it in Lee's emergence as a powerhouse running back with the potential to help fuel a potent Nittany Lion rushing at- tack for the next few years. Lee started three of Penn State's last four games and fin- ished his debut season as the team's leading rusher, total- ing 438 yards and four touchdowns on 89 carries while adding 12 catches for 66 yards. One of the reasons he was able to do all that was his talent for gaining yards after contact. Listed at 6-foot-0, 230 pounds last season, he showed that he's the kind of runner who can move piles. When James Franklin was asked for an assessment last year of Lee's running style, he focused on the hidden yards that the freshman was able to pick up just by falling forward when he's dragged down. "That's something that a lot of times goes unnoticed," Franklin said, "but when you can always fall forward, you're talking about another yard-and-a-half or two yards on every run." Lee said he started to develop his powerful running style early in his high school career at American Collegiate Academy in St. Petersburg, Fla. "I've always been tough," he said. "I always want to make people feel it. That's how it came. I would say 10th grade was when I realized that I could do that. That was my style. That's me." Penn State fans got to see that power on display a lot ear- lier than expected. Lee arrived on campus last July and went into his freshman season expecting to play sparingly. He figured the coaches would give him a chance at some point to show what he could do, especially since the season didn't count against anyone's eligibility. But with Journey Brown, Noah Cain and Devyn Ford ahead of him, and fel- low Floridian Caziah Holmes joining him in the Class of 2020, Lee didn't think he was going to get a whole lot of carries. He thought wrong. Brown saw his career end when he was diagnosed with a heart ailment, and Cain went down with an injury on Penn | K PILE DRIVER Lee led PSU with 438 yards last season. Photo by Mark Selders/Penn State Athletics

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