Growing up in Ontario, Canada, Chase Brown wasn’t exactly born into an environment ripe for developing NFL stars.
Chase, along with his twin brother Sydney, shifted among homeless shelters, relatives’ residences, and eventually countries.
No matter where Chase lay his head down, he fixated on one mission.
“My whole life I’ve always wanted to play in the NFL,” he said. “Growing up in Canada, it seems like the NFL has always been this impossible dream.”
He promises he wasn’t “delusional” back then, but always had a belief he’d make it despite the long odds.
As his journey moved from living with his mom in Ontario to a junior year of high school with a host family at St. Stephen High School in Florida to one year at Western Michigan and, eventually, four seasons at the University of Illinois, there was only one constant in his pursuit of the impossible. It was a constant that would fuel his rise from backup to timeshare to breakout star on an offense already full of them over his first two seasons in the NFL.
“I’m just kind of addicted to seeing the results of putting in the work,” he said, then pinpointing the why at the core of his drive. “To prove to my younger self that you can really be that guy, be a dude in this league.”
The Bengals are betting big that he already is one after coming off an offseason where determination produced more results.
“Add another monster to the fire,” linebacker Logan Wilson said.
Players putting in the work is an NFL cliché. Nearly everyone brings a level of competitive drive. It’s a prerequisite for landing among the greatest 1,696 players in the world.
But from Brown’s earliest moments in Cincinnati, those in the building took notice. Yeah, Brown was merely a fifth-round pick from the 2023 draft and buried on the depth chart.
His motivation defined him.
“There are guys that it just becomes how they carry themselves, the look in their eye when you talk to him, how you see him go about their day in the building, that it just becomes apparent very, very early that this guy is obsessive about his preparation,” offensive coordinator Dan Pitcher said. “There’s something motivating him that’s unusual even at this level of highly, highly motivated people. And I would put him in that bucket.”
That’s why Pitcher can’t stop making bold claims about the third-year back.
“I believe Chase Brown is a top-10 back in this league,” Pitcher said. “We’ve got a guy.”
Belief stems from watching him seize the role of breakout star in the second half of last season. From Week 9, when Brown took the full-time job from injured Zack Moss until he got hurt at the conclusion of a Week 17 win against Denver, Brown ranked fifth in the NFL in yards from scrimmage — only two spots and 29 yards behind his triple-crown-winning teammate Ja’Marr Chase.
He ripped off five consecutive games with 100-plus yards from scrimmage. Not only did he win friends in fantasy leagues, but he won them across the Bengals’ locker room.
Brown calls it making himself “undeniable.” Others call it watching a player set the example for how you work in the background, waiting for your chance to arrive.
“It’s hard to compare him with anybody,” running backs coach Justin Hill said. “You are not going to find anybody in the building that works harder than him. There is not a day, work day or off day, that he is not in the building working on something. Whether pass game, run game, he wants to find something to get better at. It’s in his DNA. The sky is the limit for him because of his work ethic.”
Drew Lieberman called it. Hired as a personal wide receiver coach for Brown and Andrei Iosivas before last season, he couldn’t believe the progress. He saw the breakout coming.
“The fastest improvement of any players I’ve ever had in the program of 15 years doing this,” he said at the time. “I’ve never seen a transformation like it.”
Brown took a note from head coach Zac Taylor in his rookie season debrief meeting on becoming a better receiver and didn’t just train with Lieberman, but followed him. Whether early morning or late night in Atlanta, on a business trip to Las Vegas, they found a field to fit in sessions. Before OTAs, after minicamp, you name it.
Brown always worked. The difference in this case was that he worked with a direct purpose.
“I always worked really hard, but maybe not necessarily in the right way,” Brown said. “I’m always lifting and doing work, but I never put a lot of time into actual football, so I’ve always seen results in that sense as far as pushing my body in the gym and just doing speed work, but in the NFL, I never really pushed myself really hard as a football player.”
He felt the impact immediately despite sharing time with Moss. The highlight of his rookie season was becoming the second-fastest ball carrier in the league that year, crossing 22 mph on a 64-yard touchdown run. The first eight weeks of last season, Brown averaged 4.6 yards per carry on 94 rushes while Moss averaged 3.3 yards per carry on 97.
He caught 16 passes, but couldn’t find the explosiveness he hoped to create.
Once Moss went down with a neck injury, the entire dynamic changed. Brown wasn’t just racking up yards — 157 that Sunday, to be exact. He racked up reps with Joe Burrow.
Brown didn’t see much time on passing downs in his split with Moss. Coaches stressed the importance of learning that skill and liked what they’d seen from him in practices and a small sample size, but when it came to protecting QB1, lack of experience shifted those duties to the veteran.
Once Brown took over 100 percent of the workload, the work he put into perfecting pass protection built trust with the quarterback and coaching staff.
“The nuances of it, the technique of it, the eye progression of it has improved over the early part of last season, all the way through last season,” Taylor said. “And you feel outstanding about it.”
That development also uncovered what quickly became one of the offense’s most potent weapons.
Brown’s off-script chemistry with Burrow amped up as plays broke down, and they often did last season.
According to TruMedia, over the second half of last season on plays where the quarterback held the ball for at least 3.5 seconds, Brown led all running backs in receiving yards. It wasn’t close.
He caught 11 passes for 114 yards, eight first downs, five explosives and two touchdowns.
No other running back produced more than 69 yards in those situations.
The plays added a new element to the entire Bengals offense.
“I just have this weird sense for like if I see Joe roll out like there’s something that just goes off internally where it’s like, ‘Oh, here we go, this is what I’ve been waiting for,’” Brown said. “Unless it’s a designed play to me, I just wait for the scramble drill because a lot of my routes are underneath and I’m able to kind of run around and make some plays off that.”
Brown took his development from last season and returned to Lieberman this offseason with a renewed focus on route running, trying to elevate on-script to match his off-script magic.
The Bengals responded accordingly. OTAs and training camp were filled with splitting Brown outside and testing matchups against safeties and linebackers. This grew far beyond the typical choice routes coming out of the backfield. This was true receiver usage.
“Splitting out as a receiver and having a real understanding of what our receivers go through and what Joe is going to see — he’s become really valuable in that way,” Taylor said.
Brown’s motivation led the charge again.
One practice, he ran a route down the sideline and it wasn’t tight enough to create a completion. After practice, Brown shifted to another field and ran it another 10 times, catching passes from a staffer until he got it right.
Later in camp, there he was, catching nearly every route imaginable, even against tight coverage down the sideline, matched up against Wilson.
“He’s trying to separate himself in the receiving game, and he’s going to be a problem this season,” Wilson said. “He’s done a lot of work to get better at route running. He’s a true receiving threat wherever he is at on the field at all times.”
His improvement in the area allowed Taylor and Pitcher to comfortably expand those chapters of the playbook.
“His willingness and relentlessness to work in different areas of his game, catching the football, running routes, pass protecting, everybody knows how big a part of playing running back that is for us,” Pitcher said. “If you want to be the one who is on the field for the bulk of early downs, you got to be able to block a nickel off the edge, block a Mike in the B gap, we know that. And so how he’s taken that and really taken it to heart. And it’s not perfect, but he’s shown us that he can do it. I’ve said a lot of really good things about him, and I’ve meant every one, and I’ll say them again. He’s a big part of what we’re going to do here.”
Brown still only averaged 4.2 yards per carry despite his monster second half. Among qualifying backs, he finished second-best in percentage of runs for zero or negative yards. His runs weren’t getting blown up. Yet, considering his athleticism and explosiveness with the ball, he wasn’t breaking long runs.
He ranked 28th out of 31 qualifiers in percentage of runs going for 10-plus yards.
The Bengals moved on from offensive line coach and run game coordinator Frank Pollack this offseason. Pitcher assembled a collective of his staff to tweak a run game to be built around Brown’s skill set.
“We tried to simplify and just find ways to do more with less and find ways to get him the ball downhill,” Hill said. “We tweaked how we do things in the mid-zone or wide zone game because of him.”
Brown wasn’t even the feature back when they imagined the run game last year. Knowing his style and connecting that with the scheme allowed for an exciting new chapter for this offense on the ground. One that increases the number of explosive runs by taking advantage of Brown’s speed, vision and acceleration to the point of attack.
“We have a lot of guys on staff that have done parts of (building a run game) at different stops in their career,” Pitcher said. “So, it’s kind of listening to them, really delving into it myself and trying to come up with something that really complements who we are and what our engine is.”
This season, the engine is known.
Life changed for Brown since he last played in a regular-season game. Yes, he added more prominent endorsements from the likes of NuEnergy and Nike, growing his profile beyond posts about poutine and football.
He became a dad for the first time on Jan. 22 with the birth of his son, Oceanz.
He enjoys lying around for naps and can’t get over the “blessing” that opened his eyes.
While the mind wanders during those naps, there’s plenty of time to contemplate his family’s future and the fact that he’ll be extension-eligible after this season. He’ll enter a market where refusal to pay running backs is no longer en vogue. Saquon Barkley leads the way at $20 million per year and the top backs are all making $10 million-plus.
The last thing Bengals fans need to worry about is another extension negotiation conversation.
Brown’s approach stayed on brand, though. Put in the work, let results follow.
“In the back of my mind, I’ve thought about it,” Brown said. “But what I’ve done with that this year is I’m — and I’m being completely honest when I say this — I’m trying to just focus on making the plays. If I make the plays, I’ll make myself undeniable for a second contract.”
Undeniable, indeed.
He could reach rarified air just by replicating last season’s breakout. Extrapolating his numbers from the second half of last season over a full year would put him well over 1,000 yards rushing and 500 receiving.
Only two backs have accomplished both in a season since 2020: Jahmyr Gibbs and Christian McCaffrey.
“It’s realistic,” Brown said. “It’s a matter of making those plays and check the stats after. I think it’s a real conversation.”
The conversation continues to build around the 25-year-old. He needs to prove he can do it again, and this time for a full season. The Bengals have seen enough and are building around it. As you might expect, Brown has no doubt. The piercing image of that younger version of himself chasing the impossible dream won’t let him.
“I’ve always had this self-confidence to a point where I knew I could do it,” he said. “I just gotta figure out how I’m gonna get there. I always knew I could play in the NFL. I always knew I could make a difference on a football team somewhere, but it’s really just figuring out, like, the middle ground. Once I get my foot in the door, I’m gonna figure out a way to really show everybody why they drafted me and why they should trust me with the ball in my hands.”
