The Return Of The King: Derrick Henry Isn't Ready To Give Up The Throne

October 12, 2022

Joe Nicely breaks down the performance of Derrick Henry through five weeks and evaluates the fantasy football upside of Henry going forward in the 2022 NFL season.

Derrick Henry in today’s NFL is something of a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation. It’s not really a true fit, but in this case, the peg is willing and able to smash and batter the hole into submission by any means necessary.

That’s what King Henry has been doing to NFL defenses since transitioning to the full-time starting RB role for the Tennessee Titans at the tail end of the 2018 season. In today's world of smaller and shiftier specialized running backs, he’s a true throwback to the days when superstar backs with names like Brown, Campbell, and Dickerson still roamed the Earth and ruled the gridiron with speed and power. His reign as the current king of this dying breed has been largely uninterrupted and unquestioned, but a season-ending injury midway through 2021, coupled with an uninspired appearance in the postseason and a sluggish start to 2022, had many wondering if Henry’s dominant time atop the game was coming to an end.

However, as the Tennessee Titans head into their bye week, it turns out the reports of Derrick Henry’s demise were greatly exaggerated. A true king isn’t going to relinquish his throne without a fight, after all. It’s not really supposed to be possible for running backs in the modern game to truly dominate, yet that’s what we’re still seeing from Henry in the year of our Lord 2022…a player that’s big enough, strong enough, and fast enough to bend games to his will.

All The King's Men

It really is amazing the role fate - for lack of a better word - can have on a player’s career trajectory. Is Tom Brady still Tom Brady if he isn’t drafted by the New England Patriots? Is Ryan Leaf still Ryan Leaf if he lands with a different organization? So on and so forth we could go.  

Even with all of his generational-type physical gifts, it’s kind of a miracle that Derrick Henry is, well, Derrick Henry at all. It isn’t hard to envision lots of scenarios where the throwback beast gets lost in modern-day offenses and is used as a specialty/goal-line back for a few years before washing out of the NFL altogether.

Fortunately, he landed with the Tennessee Titans after a Heisman Trophy-winning career at Alabama. And while Henry was used as something of a specialty back behind Titans' starter Demarco Murray for the first two years of his professional career, Nashville was indeed a dreamy landing spot, as the Titans were steered at that time by none other than the originator of the “Exotic Smashmouth” offense, Mike Mularkey. Mularkey's willingness to embrace the run was considered by many - even at that time - to be outdated, though it presented Henry with a wide-open door to a career in the league. 

Through fate or luck, Henry was then blessed with the perfect head coach hire when Mike Vrabel was brought in to replace Mularkey in 2018. Vrabel - an old-school former linebacker with Bill Belichick influences - hired Matt LaFleur to be his offensive coordinator and, despite neither being a part of Mularkey's previous coaching staff, both were willing to carry the torch of Mularkey’s run-heavy dream with the uniquely-talented Henry as the centerpiece. Over the course of Vrabel’s tenure at the helm in Nashville (2018-present), Tennessee has cycled through three offensive coordinators, but the plan has never changed: get the ball to the Big Dog. As a result of this ground-and-pound philosophy, Henry's volume has - and remains - off the charts. He has accumulated a ridiculous 1,219 rushing attempts since Vrabel became the Titans' head coach in 2018, the most in the NFL during that timespan.

Ascending To The Throne

Tennessee’s willingness to make Henry one of the league’s true workhorse backs is undoubtedly a large component of his success, but the Alabama product has been able to capitalize on that workload in a commanding way. 

Since his first full season as the starting RB for the Titans in 2019, Henry led the NFL in rushing attempts, rushing yards, rushing TDs, and rushing yards per game in back-to-back seasons (‘19 & ‘20). He crossed the 2,000-yard rushing benchmark in ‘20 and was named the NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year. 

In addition to his real-world success, Henry has been a fantasy revelation. Prior to last year's injury-shortened campaign, he had finished as the RB1 or RB2 in both Standard and Half-PPR formats in 2019 and 2020. While his detractors often, fairly, bring up his lack of production in the passing game, he still managed to finish as the RB5 and RB3 in Full PPR scoring over his last two full seasons (‘19 & ‘20). Translation: Henry gets it done for his fantasy managers, no matter the format.

Heavy Lies The Crown

As we all know, running backs in the NFL have a limited shelf life. Henry’s age - 28 years old - coupled with his uber-physical running style and voluminous workload is cause for reasonable concern. 

Red flags shot up when he went down in Week 8 last season with what was diagnosed as a Jones fracture. He was on pace to break the NFL’s single-season rushing record at the time, but the injury ended Henry’s regular season, and although it was the first significant injury of his illustrious career, it felt ominous. 

The fear appeared justified when Henry returned for Tennessee’s divisional playoff matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals and looked like a shell of himself en route to just 62 yards on 20 carries in a 19-16 loss to the Super Bowl-bound Bengals.

Many felt that Henry was rushed back too soon for the 2021 postseason and placed in a no-win situation. Fantasy managers remained fairly confident in his ability to return to form this season, as his ADP held strong at around No. 5 overall in most 2022 drafts.

However, even the staunchest of Henry backers were likely sweating through the first two games of the season, as he managed just a paltry 3.1 yards per carry with no scores in Tennessee’s 0-2 start. We’ve seen it before with other running backs…the end can come swiftly.

Return Of The King

After slumping out of the gate this season, a Week 3 home matchup against the Las Vegas Raiders now looks like a pivotal turning point for Henry and this Titans offense. He passed the eye test, looking fresh and powerful en route to rumbling for 85 yards and a TD on the ground, but it was his work in the passing game - yes…the passing game - that was so encouraging. 

Historically a zero through the air, Henry tied a career-high with six targets against Las Vegas in Week 3, recording five catches for 58 yards. It would be easy to label the performance an outlier, but he’s now been targeted a combined seven times in Tennessee’s two subsequent games and has reeled in a total of five passes for 63 yards across Weeks 4 & 5.

While that work through the air might not seem significant in comparison to some other RBs, Henry has, rather notoriously, never caught more than 20 passes in a season. Surprisingly, he’s on pace to smash that mark this year, as he now stands halfway there with 10 receptions through five games.

His target share split with the Titans' "pass-catching back", Dontrell Hilliard, is surprisingly close. Hilliard has garnered a 14.4% target share of Tennessee's pass work, while Henry's 11.8% target share is not only staggeringly close but also very respectable in comparison to other RBs across the league, as he ranks just below Tampa Bay's Leonard Fournette and just above Green Bay's Aaron Jones in team target share percentage through Week 5. Tennessee’s newfound willingness to utilize him in the passing game stands to be a boon for Henry’s fantasy backers, especially those in Full PPR leagues that were likely able to grab him at a slight discount.

In addition to the fantasy-scoring boost his receiving work can provide, there’s reason to remain optimistic about his traditional role as well, as it remains robust. Through Week 5, Henry leads the NFL in rushing attempts (104) and stands third in the league in total opportunities (118). He remains the unquestioned alpha in the Tennessee backfield by garnering a dominant 77% of the team's carries - the fourth-highest share in the NFL this season - and maintains a stranglehold on the Titans' red zone carries with a staggering 85.71% of the totes inside the 20-yard line.

The 28-year-old is still making the most of this volume. He remains extremely hard to bring down, as he's amassed 318 yards after contact this season, a mark that's the fourth-highest in the NFL. His role in the passing game still feels as though it's evolving, but he has been unquestionably productive through the air, logging three receptions of 20-plus yards and notching 2.20 yards per route run, which puts him in the 94th percentile of NFL running backs. 

Father Time comes for us all and that's especially true in the case of NFL running backs. But while Derrick Henry's reign of dominance will eventually come to an end, the king isn't ready to give up his crown just yet.

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