While the Kansas City Chiefs are bracing for their meeting with Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry in Sunday’s AFC Championship Game, Reggie Ragland is looking forward to it. The Chiefs linebacker considers Henry “one of my closest friends” since their days as teammates at Alabama.
Henry also excels at the type of football that Ragland relishes. The Titans have passed for 154 yards in their two playoff victories while Henry has run for 377 yards on 64 carries.
“I just told them you’ve just got to go out there and try to hit him,” Ragland said about the insight he’d provided to his current teammates about his former teammate. “He’s a big guy, and if you’re playing defense, you’ve got to love to hit, so this is my type of game. I think I’m used to hitting him a little bit from my years at Bama with him, but we’ve just got to go out there, get in the way of him and just hit him and wrap him up.”
Kansas City defensive players have been stepping behind the press-conference lecturn to explain how they can do a better job stopping Henry than the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens did in their playoff losses or they did the first time around against Henry, when he ran for 188 yards and two touchdowns in Tennessee’s 35-32 victory over the Chiefs on Nov. 10. Safety Tyrann Mathieu said Kansas City plans to “kill the engine” by attacking Henry low and taking out his legs.
“Anytime you got a running back that can run a 4.5, that’s 6-4, 240, you’ve got to kill the engine, as the coaches would say,” Ragland said. “But me, I’m just going to go in there and hit him because I just love to hit, so I’m just going to do the best I can. If I’m the first guy there, I’ve got to try to hold him up and let the cavalry come. We’ve just got to go out there and try to hit him. It’s football. It’s that time of year. Everybody’s trying to win the championship, so I don’t care how big you is, we’ve got to go out there and play.”
In last year's AFC title game, Ragland intercepted a Tom Brady pass in the end zone, but the Chiefs lost to the New England Patriots 37-31 in overtime. Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes threw 50 touchdown passes and was the NFL MVP last season, and New England did its best to keep the football away from the Chiefs in the 2018 conference championship game with a time-of-possession figure that was more than double Kansas City's.
Ragland said if that happens on Sunday, Henry will pound Kansas City into the Arrowhead Stadium turf.
“You can’t give them opportunities to get up on you,” Ragland said, “so for us on the defensive side, we got to do what we do, stop them and let the offense go out there and play ball. We got to get stops. That’s the name of the game because once they get up on you, here comes Derrick, and they’re going to hand it off and pound it and pound the play-action, pound it and pound the screens, pound and pound it, and that’s how it’s going to go 'til they just try to run the clock out, so our job on defense is to get them in third-and-long and don’t give them chances to have third-and-short because that’s when they thrive the most in them short situations, handing the ball off to Derrick, and they’ve just been getting it and getting the time off the clock, so it’s our job to stop them and give the ball to Pat, because nobody wants to give Pat the ball.”
Since losing to Tennessee, Kansas City has won seven games in a row. During the winning streak, the Chiefs defense has yielded an average of 94.9 rushing yards per game after giving up an average of 148.1 rushing yards in the first 10 games of the season.
“It’s bring your lunch pail to work every day and get the job done,” Ragland said about the improvement. “That’s really been our mentality since we started off bad, and we just steady working and working. You’ve got to come to work.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Chiefs' only NFL championship -- a 23-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970. Kansas City has made 17 trips to the playoffs since then, including each of the past four years, without making it back to the Super Bowl.
The Titans and Chiefs kick off at 2:05 p.m. CST Sunday in Kansas City, Missouri. CBS will televise the game.
“I don’t want no excuses from this week,” the former Bob Jones High School star said. “It’s time to get the job done.”
Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.
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https://www.al.com/sports/2020/01/reggie-ragland-looking-forward-to-my-type-of-game-against-derrick-henry.html
2020-01-18 11:30:00Z
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