In his new home with the Ravens, Derrick Henry is still competing against himself (2024)

OWINGS MILLS, Md. — The prized acquisition of the Baltimore Ravens walks in.

Derrick Henry’s shoulders seem wide as a chin-up bar, his torso like the door of a bank vault, his muscles like risen bread. Even in an environment teeming with abnormally proportioned human beings, the 6-foot-3, 252-pound running back is different. Ravens running backs coach Willie Taggart says he’s a “mutant,” trainer Melvin Sanders calls him a “freak.”

The former Tennessee Titan is different in other ways, too.

As he walks in, his expression is anguished and distant.

Is he OK?

Yeah, he’s fine, he says.

Then why the twisted face?

Well, he just came off the field after a June practice with his new team. He messed up a blitz protection. The quarterback didn’t take a hit, the defense didn’t make a big play, no game was lost. But Henry will think about it until he sleeps, assuming he can.

And his glower explains why he may be the best offseason addition for any NFL team.

Henry’s fascination with running the football started as a child. He was inspired by two older cousins — Justin Glover, who ran the ball for Bolles High in Jacksonville on a 2A state championship team, and Tahj Kimble, who earned a scholarship from Boston College.

Convinced being a running back was his calling, Henry studied the best: Gale Sayers, Walter Payton, Earl Campbell and Eric Dickerson. Emmitt Smith was from Florida, too, so Henry watched him whenever possible.

He was a fan of Jacksonville’s Fred Taylor, who played not far from Henry’s home in Yulee, Fla. There were fascinations with Barry Sanders, Maurice Jones-Drew, Edgerrin James, Ricky Williams, Curtis Martin, Shaun Alexander, Stephen Jackson, Eddie George, Jamaal Lewis, Priest Holmes, Larry Johnson and Frank Gore.

“I can go on and on,” he says.

With the ball in his hands, he did.

At Yulee High, he ran for 485 yards in a game, 4,261 yards in a season and 12,124 yards in his career. At Alabama in 2015, he had more rushing yards in a season than any player in the history of the SEC, breaking a record that had been held for 34 years. Henry also won the Heisman Trophy and helped the Crimson Tide to a national championship that year.

The Titans didn’t plan to draft him, but when he was available 14 picks into the second round in 2016, they veered.

They had recently traded for DeMarco Murray, who led the league in rushing just two seasons earlier, and it would be Murray’s ball to carry. For two seasons, Henry was more of an annoyance to Murray than he was to opponents. When coaches tried to send Henry on the field to spell Murray, the veteran sometimes waved him off.

This was a challenge unlike any Henry had experienced.

“He went from being the Heisman winner, the man, the one everybody counted on to do it all at Alabama to maybe seeing the field five minutes a game,” says Adrianna Rivas, Henry’s girlfriend since his rookie year. “It was kind of a shock. And it was tough, really tough for him.”

On days when Murray missed practice, Henry made teammates wonder why he was second string. When he was sent in during mop-up time to eat up clock, he ate up yards instead.

Titans center Ben Jones, a captain at the time, took note. Jones became many things to Henry — blocker, mentor, adviser and friend, really good friend. They shared three meals a day, as well as an acupuncture therapist. After every game, Henry returned home and called Jones to review his performance.

“Did I hit the right hole?”

“Did I hit this cut right?”

“Should I have pressed this longer?”

Through the first seven games of this third season, it still wasn’t coming together. Henry was averaging 3.25 yards per carry and had one touchdown. He was second-string, this time behind free-agent signing Dion Lewis, and on the trade block. He says he feared being cut.

That’s when he asked former Titans star Eddie George what he was doing wrong. George told him he was trying to score on every carry instead of taking what the defense gave him. He said he needed to play to his strength — literally — and wear defenses down with contact.

Sometimes, George told him, a 2-yard run is a win.

Over the last four weeks of the 2018 season, Henry rushed for 585 yards and seven touchdowns, averaging 6.7 yards per carry.

In an early December game against the Jaguars, Henry took his sixth carry of the day in the Tennessee end zone and ran up the middle before breaking outside. At the 18, a stiff arm drove cornerback A.J. Bouye backward. Linebacker Leon Jacobs had an angle on Henry, but he swatted him away as if he were an insect. Finally, Henry ran through a tackle attempt by linebacker Myles Jack before scoring. Titans tackle Taylor Lewan called the 99-yard run “the greatest football play I’ve ever seen.”

Henry led the league in rushing in each of the next two seasons. Since 2018, he has had 1,757 more rushing yards (1,136 after contact), 37 more broken tackles and 27 more rushing touchdowns than any player in the league. NFL Network named him a top-25 player four times and a top-10 player twice.

It wasn’t just the adjustment in his running style. Henry takes care of his body better than anyone Jones has known. “He does everything right,” Jones says.

Henry’s financial adviser, Pete Kotos, estimates Henry spends $240,000 yearly on body maintenance, which includes employing a personal chef who prepares all of Henry’s meals. Henry eats no fried foods, gluten, dairy or artificial sugars.

During the season, he doesn’t eat his first meal until 4 or 5 p.m. and eats only one other meal, usually around 8 p.m. (in the offseason, his first meal is around 1 p.m.). When he does eat, he consumes nearly enough for a pride of lions.

“I probably eat three chicken breasts, some rice and broccoli,” he says. “Then I have some gluten-free pancakes, scrambled eggs, diced potatoes, home fries and some steak.”

Before practice, he might have kale, an avocado or a banana to get something in his system. Three days a week, he takes IV fluids that contain a shot of vitamin E, Coenzyme Q10 and other nutrients.

Henry begins two-a-day workouts at SandersFit Performance Center in Dallas a couple of days after every season ends. He takes no days off.

“If I am going to spend time somewhere, it probably will be a gym because that’s what I love doing,” he says.

He loves running hills. At SandersFit, he does up to 10 sprints on a 100-yard hill. He loves working his arms, doing hammer curls with 80-pound dumbbells. And he loves working his legs, doing Bulgarian split squats with 120-pound dumbbells.

Henry also takes recovery seriously, using cold therapy, infrared sauna, hyperbaric oxygen, massage therapy and bodywork to come back stronger. Sanders said he believes Henry is stronger than he’s ever been.

Part of it is competitive spirit. Henry competes with the league’s other running backs, with middle linebackers lined up across from him, with the player he used to be and the player critics say he is becoming.

Henry works up a sweat at Dave & Buster’s and Topgolf. He and Rivas stayed at an Airbnb in Orlando for the Pro Bowl earlier this year, and the unit had a Pop-A-Shot game. Henry tried to get the top score, then Rivas tried, then two friends tried, then Rivas’ two brothers tried, all without success. But Henry kept trying. When Rivas heard him yell later, she knew what happened.

“Of course, he beat the score,” she says. “He wasn’t going to stop until he did.”

In the first drive of a 2019 game against the Raiders, Henry felt his hamstring pull. Later it was discovered that nearly half of his muscle was torn, but he didn’t come out of the game, rushing 18 times for 103 yards and two touchdowns. He played the following week, too, adding 86 more yards before being forced to sit out one week.

“If I’m available to go, I’m gonna go,” Henry says. “If I can’t go, I’m still gonna try to go until somebody stops me.”

In 2021, Henry broke the fifth metatarsal in his right foot in the first quarter of a game against the Colts. Henry felt awful pain but gave no indication he was injured other than asking for more tape on his foot at the end of the drive. The game went into overtime, so he played nearly four full quarters with a broken bone, rushing 28 times. Henry had surgery that week and missed the next nine games. Titans trainer Todd Toriscelli says he isn’t sure how Henry kept playing.

“He would come in on Monday after 30 carries on Sunday and deny any soreness,” Toriscelli says. “Then he would go lift weights for two hours. He would then come into my office and hit a few poses and say, ‘Does this look sore?’ He actually got upset if I asked him if he was OK.”

Last October, with Henry in the final year of his Titans contract, there were rumblings he would like to play for the Ravens.

Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta was listening. He remembered the 2019 Pro Bowl, when Henry played for Baltimore coaches and DeCosta experienced Henry’s humility and magnetism. Then he thought about Henry carrying 12 times for 97 yards against the Ravens a couple of weeks prior and how he crushed them with 133 rushing yards in 2020.

“He decimated us,” DeCosta says. “If you believe in your team and an opponent torments you, that resonates.”

DeCosta agreed to the framework of a trade with Tennessee general manager Ran Carthon — a fourth-round pick that could have become a third had Henry reached certain production levels. However, others in the Titans hierarchy apparently were not on board with the deal, so Henry played out the season in Nashville.

In his last game, he rushed for 153 yards in an upset over the Jaguars, then took a microphone onto the field to express his appreciation to the fans for the greatest eight years of his life. In the news conference that followed, he thanked coaches, teammates, seven members of the kitchen staff, seven members of the equipment staff, three members of the media relations staff, two members of the security staff, two members of the cleaning staff and three people responsible for website content — 25 people in all.

"@Titans fans… Thank you for the greatest 8 years of my life." 👑💙 @KingHenry_2 pic.twitter.com/3CpEHq4PiC

— NFL (@NFL) January 7, 2024

The free-agent negotiating period began with an unexpected run on running backs. On the first day, Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs, D’Andre Swift, Tony Pollard, Devin Singletary and Austin Ekeler each agreed to terms with new teams.

For Henry, there was less clamor.

The Ravens were very interested. The Texans called. On the second day of the negotiating period, after Aaron Jones agreed to terms with the Vikings, Henry became the eighth running back to find a new team when he accepted a two-year, $16 million offer from Baltimore.

What DeCosta saw was a 16-wheeler with the acceleration of a Tesla. According to a Next Gen report, Henry ran 21.68 miles per hour after taking one handoff last season — faster than any of the backs who signed ahead of him and tied for the seventh-fastest speed in the NFL. Four of the faster players were wide receivers, and no one in the top seven weighs near 252 pounds.

In 2023, Henry had more rushing yards (1,167, second in the NFL) and more rushing touchdowns (12, seventh in the NFL) than any of the backs who signed before him. And while his 4.2 yards-per-carry average tied for the lowest of his career, it didn’t bother DeCosta, who noted the Titans’ offensive line inconsistencies.

The teams that valued other backs more highly probably were focused on two of Henry’s numbers — 30, his age, and 2,030, his carries, which is more than any active running back except Ezekiel Elliott, who has 2,065.

In late April, Rivas gave birth to the couple’s second daughter, Celine Amor. The plan was for Henry to skip a week of OTAs about a month later and spend the time with his family in Dallas. But after the last practice of the prior week, Henry told Rivas he couldn’t take the week off.

“I did terrible, absolutely terrible,” he told her. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t end like that. I have to come back. I’m sorry.”

Henry eventually took a week to stay home — but only after redeeming himself at practice. And when he was away, he repeatedly called and texted Taggart with questions from his tape study.

Henry values family time. These days, daughter Valentina, 4, often accompanies her father to his second workout of the day. One of his first priorities after moving into a new house in Dallas was building a play area for her in the yard — Valentina’s Park, they call it. He and Valentina pretend they are monsters.

The Tennessee house is for sale. Henry says Nashville and its people — especially his teammates — will always hold a special place in his heart, but change, he knows, invigorates.

“It will be good for him,” Rivas says. “He has fresh left in him.”

Henry plans to play for as long as his body will allow, though he says a Super Bowl victory could change his mind. And he believes a ring is possible with his new team.

He’s reflecting on what could be now, about how he can blend into John Harbaugh’s vision of offensive football and how he’s ready for any amount of carries that offensive coordinator Todd Monken wants to give him.

The idea of playing out of the shotgun more frequently excites him because he believes he can get more explosive runs against a spread-out defense. He thinks Lamar Jackson is the type of quarterback who can bring out the best in all his teammates — including him.

Ravens owner Steven Bisciotti, DeCosta, Harbaugh and Taggart have made him feel he belongs, he wants you to know.

The look on his face says more than his words. It’s joyful and present. And it explains why Derrick Henry may be the best offseason addition for any team.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Wesley Hitt / Getty Images)