He managed to attain 204 yards, marking a career-high, but still has some way to go to restore the full 100 percent of his health, more precisely a hamstring injury from the start of the season. All this shows that Kerryon Johnson is really close to the point of being the top rusher for the SEC and the Auburn betting odds for the next game have noticed the same trend.
Now, he will be almost fully healed for the first time since Auburn began the season. With 90 to 95 percent health, Johnson still had his best performance so far against Ole Miss. He ended up making rushes counting a sum of 204 yards and scored three touchdowns which led to the 44 to 23 victory over Ole Miss. This bumped up his total for the season to impressive 504 yards.
This score is now the second best in the SEC. What makes this even more impressive is the fact that he managed to do everything mentioned despite the fact that his hamstring injury made him miss two games in the season so far. It is clear that Kerryon Johnson is a special type of an athlete, which was echoed by Gus Malzahn, the coach of Auburn. He said that Johnson is without any doubt one of the toughest guys in the team. He explained that he does not know many players who would be able to run and score a touchdown while they have a hamstring injury that took them out for two weeks.
Now, in spite of his recovery still being on-going, the coach believes Johnson is already playing at an incredibly high level. Malzahn underlined that this says a lot about what kind of a player Johnson is. He also added that the team is focused on getting him back to 100 percent and using further the way he’s playing, which Malzahn, in his own words, like very much.
The depth of their running backs has been a problem for Auburn for the better part of the season. Johnson’s injury took him out during the first half of the start of the season. This did not stop him from eclipsing 100 yards. While he missed his games, Kamryn Pettway started in his place, but he was also suffering from a knee injury. The same injury took a turn for the worse, which left Johnson as the only choice for the position of a backfield. Now, Auburn (5-1, 3-0 in the SEC) that is ranked No. 10 will travel to LSU for a game that starts at 2:30 p.m. on this Saturday.
Johnson stated that he believed he will be back to full health and his normal physical state for the upcoming game. He believes that this will give him the confidence to make cuts, make defensive players miss and achieve faster runs. Right now, Johnson is in the lead with 12 touchdowns, 11 of which were in the last 3 games, all of them made in a rushing style. He is also second in the SEC with 126 yards of rushing per game and 29th on a national level, with an average of 5.93 carrying yards.
He also underlined last Saturday that he felt very close to his normal physical state. This allowed him to use the open field he saw and get up to scoring speeds, which clearly felt very good to him. Now, everyone, including himself, expects an even better performance this Saturday.
