Buckskin86
Moderator
Most of the guru's think he is too small to play RB and are predicting him for CB in college
Here is an article about him before his junior year
Ryan Brinson
Picture and Profile
Here is an article about him before his junior year
Ryan Brinson
Picture and Profile
Sometimes it looks so easy when Ryan Brinson runs the football.
Simple running plays become works of art when the football rests in the hands of the McKinley High School junior.
His mind and feet turn a football field into his own canvas to create masterful runs. A jab step right. A hip fake left. A flash of power. Finally a quick burst of pure speed.
A snap of the fingers later Brinson is gone. Another masterpiece is complete.
A 77-yard touchdown run against Jackson. A 75-yard scoring run against Grove City. Another 75-yard TD run, this time at Massillon. Sometimes, it is only a 3-yard gain — where he makes at least three guys miss.
Those types of runs last year as a sophomore make Brinson one of the state’s most entertaining players entering this season. Those runs also give McKinley fans reason to believe they will see a big turnaround from the Bulldogs.
Count a focused Brinson — who also made great strides off the field last year — among the ones expecting McKinley to bounce back nicely from last year’s 3-7 season.
“I think we’re going to be a pretty good team,” he said. “We’re going to shock a lot of people. We might even shock ourselves.”
Brinson shocked himself in his first full varsity season last fall. Sophomores simply do not come into a school as rich in football tradition as McKinley and rewrite the record books. They don’t break 54-year-old records, and they don’t in one season put their name ahead of all-time greats such as Marion Motley.
Brinson did all of that last year.
“Yeah, I did actually (surprise myself),” Brinson said last week on the eve of his final session of two-a-days. “ I didn’t think I was going to do that well.”
How well did he do?
The 5-foot-9, 168-pound Brinson gained 1,234 yards on just 153 carries last season, making him Stark County’s top returning rusher. He averaged 8.1 yards per carry and scored 11 touchdowns. Eight of his TD runs were of at least 40 yards.
The praise rolled in.
“If you give him one good block, you know he’s gone,” former McKinley tight end Dorian Chenault said last year.
“I don’t know if I’ve been more impressed with a sophomore running back,” Warren Harding head coach Thom McDaniels said before his team played McKinley in the 2002 season. “Everything they say about him is true. He has a tremendous future.”
New McKinley head coach Brian Cross knows first hand what Brinson can do. Cross was on the opposite sideline a year ago as the head coach of Grove City when Brinson set McKinley’s all-time single-game rushing record.
Brinson rushed for 297 yards on 21 carries to shatter John Colceri’s 54-year-old record of 268 yards. Brinson also owns McKinley’s 11th-best single-game performance with last year’s 228 yards against Waterdown, Ontario.
“He is pretty special,” Cross said with a bit of laugh, realizing his understatement.
Cross brought his former team to Fawcett Stadium in Week 5 last year, and Grove City managed to pull out a 31-28 win with a late touchdown.
Brinson, though, virtually stole the show. He shredded Grove City’s defense at times, scoring on runs of 11, 62, 75 and 41 yards. He had another long run called back because of a penalty.
“The thing that was most remarkable was how quick he got through the hole,” Cross said. “Sometimes, he was in the secondary before our defensive linemen knew where he was.”
While that Grove City performance serves as Brinson’s signature game, perhaps the biggest turning point came a week later when his mom put her son’s football career in proper perspective.
Instead of trying for his third straight 200-yard game, Brinson sat out McKinley’s rout of Washington, D.C., Roosevelt. His mom, Felicia Smith, pulled him from that game hours before kickoff after discovering he had been slacking off on his homework.
An important exam was coming up the following Monday. She wanted to make sure her son knew how important his grades were and that he studied for the exam.
“He’s a young boy, and you can’t ever let up,” Smith said. “This is something I had to be real strict about. Sometimes kids get sidetracked. They get so much attention over sports, they start to think life is all about sport. You’ve got to make sure to keep them aware of what’s important, and that’s more than just one thing.”
Brinson will never forget the moment his mom made that point to him. He was in the McKinley locker room going through his usual pregame ritual when McKinley head coach John Miller told Brinson his mother was on the phone in the coach’s office. He soon realized he would not be playing in this game.
“I got on the phone, and at first, I didn’t think she was really serious,” Brinson said. “She was like, ‘Well, you shouldn’t play, and I’m coming to get you.’ I sat there for a minute and I was like, ‘What?’ She said, ‘I’m on my way, be ready.’
“I said to myself, ‘She ain’t going to come.’ Within 10 minutes, coach Miller came in and got me and said ‘Your mom’s here.’ I came out, and there wasn’t much I could do about it.”
Smith did not make her decision on a whim.
“That was hard ... it was so hard,” Smith said. “But I felt if I didn’t do it, I would be making a big mistake. He cried. I cried, but not in front him. I was playing a tough role.”
She knew she had “to open his eyes and make him see.”
Smith knows her son shares the dream of millions of other young boys who hope to star in the NFL. She knows her son has the talent to maybe realize that dream more than most.
“But there are another 5,000 Ryan Brinsons in the United States,” she said. “I’m not saying he doesn’t have the ability, but you have to have something else. And I was saying, ‘Here’s the book.’
“To me, education is always more important than sports. I look at sports as a secondary and education as a primary.”
Brinson got the message. He talked with Miller. He later talked with his mom and his stepfather, Abe Smith. He also talked with Chenault, his cousin. Chenault was one of McKinley’s top student-athletes last year, now attending Youngstown State on a football scholarship.
“I realized she was just doing the best thing for me, and it was a wake-up call basically,” Brinson said. “Without my grades, I wasn’t going to play football. And I realized I was never going to let that happen again.”
Smith proudly said her son got an ‘A’ on his exam and “then carried it on and ended up pulling his grades up 100 percent after that.”
Brinson was back in the lineup the following week. Four weeks later, he finished his sophomore season with a 152-yard performance against Massillon.
“And I felt a lot better about myself knowing my grades were right and I was playing well,” said Brinson, who in the spring earned All-Ohio honors on McKinley’s 400-meter relay team.
The Massillon game featured one of his masterpieces, a 75-yard TD run early in the second quarter. With McKinley in the shotgun and Brinson lined up as a left halfback, he took a handoff to the right and quickly cut up field. He dodged a few defenders as he hit full speed and sprinted away from the Massillon secondary.
“I was just running as hard as I could, and I wanted to make the cut at the right time,” Brinson said of the run. “It was like I was running for my life. I was running full speed ahead, and all I saw was their orange end zone.”
Brinson approaches each carry as if it will end with him in the end zone. All he needs to find is that opening in the defense.
“It’s vision,” he said. “It’s trying to look everywhere, trying to see everyone. After that, it’s instinct. When you make that cut, it’s instinct. Some people have it, and some don’t. To be honest, I didn’t even know I had it until I started playing football when I was 8 and I started doing real well.”
Brinson collected countless trophies as a kid. He grew up admiring NFL stars Barry Sanders, Ricky Watters and Marshall Faulk. He enjoys watching highlights of Gale Sayers and Bo Jackson.
It is easy to see a bit Sanders or Sayers in the way Brinson can make high school defenders miss with his assortments of jukes and fakes.
Cross calls Brinson a complete package. “He’s got great vision, great quickness, good speed and good toughness. He’s a very physical back for his size.”
The more Cross talks about Brinson, the more he admires his toughness.
“What stood out about him when we played them was he’s not only quick, but he was a tough runner,” Cross said. “He ran the ball hard in traffic, and I thought he blocked extremely well. Most high school backs don’t block that well, but he blocks. He’s not big, but he’s very physical and very tough.”
That’s why Brinson is much more than just a junior blip on the radar screens of major colleges. Cross said plenty of colleges will be watching Brinson this season. What Brinson must do is continue to get better and stronger.
“He’s got to develop a work ethic in the weight room, and I’m not saying that he doesn’t have one,” Cross said. “But he ran track in the spring, worked in summer and I think he fiddled around with basketball a bit. Finding time to get bigger and stronger in weight room will be the thing he needs to work on the most.”
Expect Brinson to put in the work — in the weight room, on the football field and of course, in the classroom.
Ryan Brinson still has plenty of masterpieces to create and complete.
Last edited:
