Derrick Brown’s Bunyanesque senior season

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The latest entry into Derrick Brown’s Bunyanesque senior season

Posted Nov 03, 2019

5-7 minutes

Auburn Football

AP

Daniel Thomas approached Derrick Brown on the sideline Saturday night and offered up a rhetorical question for the future first-round NFL Draft pick.

“You just upping your draft stock every week, huh?” Thomas quipped.

All Brown could do was laugh. That’s all anyone in Jordan-Hare Stadium could really do after Brown’s latest Paul Bunyanesque feat during Auburn’s 20-14 in against Ole Miss.

Brown has had no shortage of awe-inspiring plays during his senior season. The 6-foot-5, 318-pounder has 37 tackles, including eight for a loss and four sacks. He has batted down three passes and nearly picked off a couple of those. He has forced a pair of fumbles on strip-sacks and recovered two more, including one he nearly returned for a touchdown at Florida had it not been for a phantom tackle by the turf monster.

Even with all of that on his game film this season, what Brown was able to do early in the second quarter against the Rebels caught nearly everyone in Jordan-Hare Stadium by surprise.

With Ole Miss facing third-and-12 at its own 34-yard line early in the period, the Rebels went four-wide with Matt Corral and running back Jerrion Ealy in the backfield. Right before Ole Miss could snap the ball, Big Kat Bryant rushed off the field for Auburn due to an issue with his helmet.

That left Auburn with 10 men on defense just before the snap, with Brown hurrying onto the field from the sideline to give Auburn a fourth defensive lineman. As Brown scurried onto the field, Ole Miss snapped the ball and Corral hit Ealy with a checkdown flare to the (apparently) open right flat.

As Ealy gathered the ball and turned upfield, where he anticipated open space, he was instead met by a 318-pound pseudo-defensive back: Brown.

“He’s like, ‘What?’ He’s looking one second, there’s nobody there, and then he turns around again,” linebacker Owen Pappoe said as he clapped his hands together. “Boom.”

The Auburn senior defensive tackle met Ealy head-on and dropped the running back in the open field for a 4-yard loss.

“That is the funniest play I’ve ever seen out of all the years I’ve played football,” Pappoe added. “He ain’t even see him coming. It was funny.”

Brown’s latest feat of athleticism seemed to draw a mixture of laughter and awe from his teammates, who were impressed with his ability to make such a play in the open field under those circumstance but couldn’t help but laugh at the situation altogether. The play even made the rounds on Twitter in the immediate aftermath, and Ole Miss offensive coordinator Rich Rodriguez was shown on the ESPN broadcast as absolutely dismayed by Brown’s heads-up third-down tackle.

“If I was that running back, I would’ve got up and just got out the game,” safety Daniel Thomas said. “I would’ve stayed down. I don’t see how he got up. But Derrick, that’s a good heads-up play. He got good awareness. That’s big.”

It was one of 12 third-down stops (on 15 tries) for Auburn’s defense, which limited Ole Miss to just 266 total yards of offense on Saturday. It also helped set up Auburn’s first scoring drive of the game, as the Tigers followed up the Rebels’ ensuing punt with a 14-play, 72-yard field goal drive for a 3-0 lead.

“You could tell that brought some juice to the sidelines seeing Derrick get that man,” Thomas said. “Derrick, he’s a special player and I’m glad he’s on our side.”

Pappoe — who described Brown as a “monster” — joked after the game that defensive coordinator Kevin Steele should let Brown play some nickel over the last three games of the season. Brown, who finished the game with a team-high seven tackles, wanted nothing to do with that thought experiment, even if he did enjoy his impromptu play there against Ole Miss — at least until he had to get up from the ground, he laughed.

“I’m (gonna) pass,” Brown said. “Because that was really stressful on me. That open-field tackle thing. I like to chase them down, hit them from the side. Looking at DBs, that whole him looking at me thing? Yeah, not about that.”

Brown said the only thing going through his mind in the moment was “don’t miss,” because he didn’t want to be made to look bad in a vulnerable situation for a 318-pound lineman in the open field. Ealy, he said, was “a little shocked” to see him there at the point of contact.

While Brown noted he has a healthy respect for what defensive backs do on a play-by-play basis, his enthusiasm for playing defensive back was likely also dampened by the fact that he sustained a shoulder stinger on the play he made against the Rebels. He briefly came out of the game and had his shoulder checked on by trainers before returning to the field.

Still, his lone tackle for a loss against Ole Miss was just the latest page in a book full of hard-to-believe feats on the football field for the Maxwell and Bednarik Award semifinalist who, somehow, keeps finding ways to impress his teammates.

“For how big he is, for how athletic he is, man, like — he’s really strong, really fast,” Pappoe said. “He’s going to be a beast (in the NFL)…. He still got that beer gut, though.”

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.