Wild Stat Shows Just How Dominant Derrick Henry Was In High School Before Taking The NFL By Storm

Derrick Henry recently kicked off the tenth season of an NFL career that will all but certainly end with him becoming a first-ballot Hall of Famer. The running back has been an absolute force to be reckoned with since he picked up where he left off in college with the Titans, and you have to feel bad for anyone who faced off against him when he was in high school thanks to an absurd stat that shows he was a human cheat code back in the day.

As things currently stand, there are only nine NFL players who’ve managed to rush for at least 2,000 yards in a single season. O.J. Simpson became the first when he achieved that feat in just 14 games in 1973, and in 2020, Derrick Henry became the eighth member of a club (which welcomed Saquon Barkley into the fold last season) with the 2,027 yards he had on the ground for the Titans.

That marked the second straight year Henry led the league in rushing yards, and with the exception of his injury-shortened campaign in 2021, he’s been the runner-up in that category every single season since then.

The 31-year-old RB is poised to be near the top of the list yet again after racking up 169 yards (and a couple of touchdowns) when the Ravens opened up their season against the Bills (a game where Buffalo took advantage of his costly fumble in the fourth quarter to pull off a dramatic comeback).

It’s hard to envy any defender tasked with stopping him, but it’s safe to say guys at the NFL level have had a bit more success on that front than the opponents he terrorized when he was in high school.

Derrick Henry still hasn’t matched the number of rushing yards he accumulated during his four years in high school at the start of his 10th season in the NFL

If you ever played against someone who ended up becoming a professional athlete when you were in high school, you can probably vividly remember the game that firmly extinguished any hopes and dreams you may have had about doing the same after ending up on the receiving end of a sobering beatdown.

Derrick Henry was responsible for more than a few of those moments during the four years he spent playing football at Yulee High School in Florida while cementing himself as the top recruit in the country ahead of a college career where he won the Heisman Trophy and a national championship at Alabama.

Henry kicked off his freshman season at Yulee in 2008, and at the time, the record for the most rushing yards recorded in a high school career was held by Ken Hall, who had 11,232 in the four years he played at Sugar Land High School in Texas between 1950 and 1953.

The mark was finally surpassed close to 70 years after it was set, as the man who rightfully earned the nickname “King Henry” had...