Most offensive linemen fear what is in front of them. Miss a block, get caught on your heels, lose your leverage — a promising play can blow up quickly.

That wasn’t what Kenny Stewart feared the most when he cleared lanes at Yulee High School in Florida a decade and a half ago. He always had to worry about what was coming from behind.

Derrick Henry, a 6-foot-3 behemoth posing as a running back, would tell Stewart in the huddle that he was running the ball to his side. That warning was all a Hornets lineman would get that a stampede would be clipping at his back.

“You would have to pancake the guy in front of you as soon as you could and get the hell out the way,” Stewart said. “Otherwise he would put his hand on you, and suddenly you was on the ground.

Added Stewart: “You did not want to get run over by that joker. When Derrick’s running your way, you ain’t thinking about nobody in front of you.”

If it feels unfair that Henry, who weighs 250 pounds yet can clock speeds near 22 mph, can punish defensive backs with teeth-chattering stiff arms in the NFL, imagine the teenage Henry — very nearly the same size — wreaking havoc on high school fields like a runaway Abrams tank. Even though Henry is one of the greatest pro running backs of his era, his high school days at Yulee inspire a stunned reverence for their ferocity and pure dominance.

The highlight tape is what you’d think it is: Henry, one of the biggest players on either team, galavanting through a crowd of defenders buzzing around him as helplessly as gnats. The numbers are their own tribute — Henry’s 12,124 rushing yards as a high school player set a national record in 2012.

With 75 yards against the Minnesota Vikings this weekend, Henry finally amassed 12,127 rushing yards in the NFL — passing his figure from four years of high school in the midst of his 10th professional season.

The 12,124 yards is a distance of nearly seven miles, a nearly unfathomable total even to former Yulee coach Bobby Ramsay, who watched the whole saga unfold.

“I mean, gosh, it’s been 13 years since he’s graduated, and I’m still getting calls about him,” Ramsay said last week. “It’s crazy that he’s been in the league this long and he still hasn’t outgained his high school numbers. … I thought that record might stand for 100 years.”

But, as much as Henry’s Yulee chapter towers in the imagination, the record might be shorter-lived. In Knox, Indiana — a town with a 3,662 population in the last Census — a running-threat quarterback is making a chase at Henry’s record that his fellow Hornets once assumed would stand for the rest of their lives.

One of the people leading the cheering section is Henry himself.

“I’m just happy for the kid, wishing him all the best,” Henry told The Banner this week. “Records are meant to be broken.”

Tall tale in a small town

Yulee High School opened in 2006. When Ramsay was hired to coach the football team a year later, he was worried he wasn’t going to find enough talent to win a game.

The Hornets got out to a rough start in 2008, and that was when Ramsay started hearing the name Derrick Henry. His offensive coordinator told him a middle schooler was coming up who would help the program a lot. Ramsay was more concerned he’d get fired for fielding a mediocre team before Henry could enroll.

Ramsay drove by the middle school field one day to get a peek at the team lined up on the 20-yard line. One player literally stood a head above the pack.

“Boom, I look at this 6-foot-2 kid, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Derrick,’” Ramsay said. “I thought, ‘Maybe if I get through this year, I’ll be OK.’”

Henry has retold the tales of his high school career so many times that he feels there is nothing new left for him to say. He told the “Pivot” podcast in 2024 that he nearly went to Bolles in Jacksonville, a more established football powerhouse, but decided to stay closer to home after taking the school’s entry test.

There are plenty of youth football phenoms, but somehow Henry was as good as advertised — if not better. As a freshman, he gained 2,465 yards and scored 26 touchdowns. From there, he kept getting better

The bonus was that Henry was doing this all in his hometown, where he lived with his grandma Gladys in a house on a dirt road with friends he had known his whole life. Instead of Henry going to Jacksonville to chase his football career, the attention wound up chasing him — over the years, fans overflowed the stands to watch the running back who could truck just about anyone who dared get in his path.

It reached a fever pitch in Henry’s senior year, when he was the one and only featured back and vaulted from a muscular 2,610 rushing yards to a state-record 4,261.

Before that year, Ramsay said, the Hornets were like the Jackson Five with Henry as the frontman. “When he was a senior, it was like he was Michael Jackson when ‘Thriller’ came out.”

TV cameras and national media came out in droves to cover Henry’s increasingly Herculean feats, including his record-setting 485 yards on 57 carries against Taylor County. Every college in the country wanted him, and recruiters could have had their own slice of the grandstand.

Defenses crowded him in the same way. There were six-man fronts or four linebackers in the box. Teams would play goal-line schemes when the Hornets were starting drives in their own territory.

“The workload is intense,” Ramsay said. “Everybody knows you’re getting the ball. It’s not a secret.”

But the numbers just kept piling up like the would-be tacklers in Henry’s wake. He had eight games in which he gained over 300 yards — not just bruising runs but fast ones, too. In eight games, Henry’s longest run was at least 65 yards.

“Magical nights,” Stewart called them, and Henry’s magnetism brought it all to the sleepy suburb of Yulee, which was previously known best as the last gas stop in Northeast Florida before the Georgia state line.

A few years back, Yulee — now population 14,195 — put up a sign outside the city limits: “Welcome to Yulee, Home to Derrick Henry, 2015 Heisman Winner.”

“He didn’t need to go to a bigger school,” Stewart said. “He liked the grind. It was a grind over here in Yulee.”

Running down a record

Myles McLaughlin hasn’t been showered with the college scholarship offers that Henry was, but he knows a little about drawing a crowd.

Last week, a small rabble of media swamped the football field in Knox to watch McLaughlin chase down the Indiana state record. He did not disappoint, piling up 410 yards on 54 carries with six touchdowns in a 50-35 win over Griffith.

At 5-foot-10 and 180 pounds, McLaughlin isn’t running over defenders and blockers indiscriminately as Henry used to, but he breaks his fair share of tackles. And like Henry, when he hits the open field, few pursuers have a chance of catching him.

Through the first 52 games of his career, McLaughlin has 11,389 rushing yards — in his senior year, he’s averaging 366 per game.

But something did catch up with McLaughlin this past week in the hallways of the school with just over 500 students: jaw-dropping shock. He was between classes when he was tagged in a video of Derrick Henry talking about him with interviewer Kay Adams.

“Running and breaking tackles,” Henry said enthusiastically while watching his highlight tape. “He a beast.”

McLaughlin almost dropped his phone.

“It was a crazy couple of minutes,” McLaughlin said. “When he called me a beast, that definitely gave me a lot more confidence.”

Like Henry in the Yulee days, McLaughlin wears No. 2. Knox has been open longer than Yulee, but it never was considered a football powerhouse in Indiana’s 3A classification. Myles’ father, Josh, held Knox’s career rushing record for a generation — Myles broke his dad’s mark in his sophomore year.

“We knew he was going to be special from the time he was young,” said Neill Minix, Knox’s athletic director who also played offensive line with Myles’ father. “It’s crazy to see what’s happening now.”

One of the tenets that has been handed down from father to son is giving credit to the linemen. On Monday, the Knox offensive line came over to McLaughlin’s house for a round of steaks. “I’ve bought them breakfast a few times, too,” he said.

McLaughlin came in with the goal of becoming Indiana’s second-leading rusher this season but blew it out of the water. The margin he needs to reach Henry’s record is achievable, but Knox is now in the playoffs and the team would likely have to win at least twice more — for a total of three more games — to give McLaughlin the best shot.

But the record isn’t what hangs over the rest of McLaughlin’s football career. It’s simply finishing on the best possible note.

“I’m just trying to win the game,” he said. “For the rest of the year, it’s lose and you’re done.”

Carrying a legacy

Although Ramsay, who now coaches at Andrew Jackson High in the Jacksonville area, knows he’ll forever be best remembered as Derrick Henry’s high school coach, he mostly enjoys it. There is really just one drawback.

Every few years, Henry’s statistics go viral again, and someone new wants to weigh in on how Henry had 462 carries his senior year. Ramsay has been called a stat padder, a score runner, but the perception that bothers him the most is that he didn’t care about Henry’s well-being.

The 57-carry game can be an especially volatile subject. When Henry appeared on the “Pivot” podcast last year, host Ryan Clark said, “Your [high school] coach should be in jail” for the number of carries Henry got. At the time, Ramsay said, Henry needed to get an extraordinary number of touches for Yulee to win tough games — but the bigger issue was that Henry would rarely stop asking for the ball.

“I knew it was an insane amount of carries, but he never got one carry he didn’t want,” he said. “I had more problems if I didn’t give him the ball than if I did. He could just do it.”

History has given Ramsay grace, too. Henry is one of the most durable running backs in NFL history, much less high school history. “Should I apologize for getting him to Alabama? I think I can live with that.”

It’s unclear for McLaughlin, who has 406 carries through his first 12 games, if that many touches will lead to glory at the next level. As of last week, he had just one FCS offer to nearby Valparaiso. He’s hoping coaches will notice his speed, durability and willingness to compete.

Henry understands that mentality — taking your small-town team on your back, no matter how crazy the stat line looks. Although he looks back in wonder that he ever got 57 carries in a game, he remembers what it felt like to take that on. He’s one of the few players in the world who can relate.

“I just think, in high school, you want to do anything you can to help your team win, playing with the guys you grew up with and playing in front of your hometown,” Henry said. “You’re not thinking about carries. You’re just trying to make plays and putting the wins together.”

Henry lives in the moment. He’s not reflecting on his high school record, which feels irrelevant as he helps the Ravens recover from their rough start this season and get to his goal of winning a Super Bowl.

He keeps up with the folks in his hometown — Ramsay saw him at a wedding they both attended this summer — but rehashing the past isn’t important to him. Neither is owning one of the sports’ top-shelf high school records.

Now a charter fisherman in Yulee, Stewart gets a ton of mileage out of old Derrick Henry stories. He assumed it would be much longer than 13 years before anyone could chase down the rushing record, yet it makes sense to him that Henry would welcome the competition to his legacy.

“I love seeing kids compete — that’s the whole mentality of the sport, competition,” Stewart said. “I love seeing a kid do his best. Like Derrick said, records are meant to be broken. I wish the best for any kid trying to do it.”

Henry has seen the highlights of McLaughlin, has laughed that both wore No. 2 in high school. He has called him a beast and given him as much encouragement as a high school senior could ever hope to hear.

“He’s one of the GOATs,” McLaughlin said. “I appreciate him speaking on my name.”

There’s only one thing left for McLaughlin to do — the one thing defenders throughout Northeast Florida struggled to do for four years.

He can chase down Derrick Henry, who is cheering him on from Baltimore.

“Happy for the kid. Hope he does great,” Henry said. “Go win. Go ball out.”