Journey Brown Found His Identity When Football Couldn't Define Him Anymore
The former Penn State star's football career was ended by heart condition, but his journey toward purpose and family has just begun.
Journey Brown’s grandmother, Elen, knew before anyone else. When he burst through the nursing home doors with news of his Penn State football scholarship offer, she barely looked up from her chair.
“Penn State, Penn State offered me!” he shouted, breathless with excitement.
She nodded once. “I know.”
“How you know?”
“How couldn’t they?” she said simply. “I knew you could get that offer. I know you.”
That moment captures everything about Brown’s journey from small-town Pennsylvania to Penn State’s backfield and beyond. His grandmother’s quiet confidence, his explosive joy, the family bonds that shaped him — all present in one conversation that would help determine the next chapter of his life.
What none of them knew then was how quickly that chapter would end, and how much more meaningful the one that followed would become.
Brown walked into the medical facility in Hershey, Pennsylvania cocky as ever, fresh off another grueling workout while waiting for COVID-19 protocols to clear him for the 2020 football season. At 230 pounds and running faster than he ever had, he felt invincible.
“I just got my MRI, I just got [my] CAT scan, everything, and I’m walking past, like, all the doctors are sitting there in front of computers and stuff. And I’m trying to see my heart, because, you know, they have it on the TV screen, and I’m looking at it,” Brown recalls. “I’m like, yeah—I’m talking smack. So I said, how she [my heart] looking? I said she looking good, huh?”
The doctor’s response — “Oh, you know, we’ll see. We gotta run a couple more tests,” — didn’t sit right. His grandmother had always told him to trust his gut. But Brown pushed the feeling aside and continued training with younger players while the team waited for clearance.
Then came the meeting request from James Franklin. Brown figured everyone had to meet with the head coach after their tests—after all, this was the height of COVID. Walking into that room in September 2020, he expected routine business.
Instead, he found Franklin, running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider, team doctors and other staff members wearing expressions that immediately shifted the energy.
“I’m a people person, so I can tell when something’s off. And once again, I can feel the [bad] vibe in the room,” Brown says. “I’m looking around, like, what the hell is going on? I’m looking at Coach Seider, and I knew something was really fishy, because Coach Seider is mine. He’s like my second dad.”
The doctors explained they’d found something in his heart during testing: arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM), a condition that makes intense physical activity potentially fatal. The 2020 season was out. His career was potentially over.
But Brown’s first reaction was laughter.
“I said, ‘Yeah, so I ain’t missing shit. Like, you got the wrong guy,” he remembers. “I felt the best I ever felt… if somebody told me that was your peak, I’m like, I believe you.”
Coming off his Cotton Bowl MVP performance — 202 rushing yards on 16 carries with two touchdowns in Penn State’s 53-39 victory over Memphis — Brown believed he was ascending toward elite company with Saquon Barkley and Miles Sanders.
When the laughter died and reality hit, Brown felt anger shoot up his body “from the bottom of my feet.” He walked outside Franklin’s office, started yelling, and nearly punched the metal fence before Franklin hugged him from behind and told him to calm down.
The anger then gave way to a different fear: “What am I supposed to tell my mom?”
Brown refused to accept the Hershey diagnosis without a second opinion. Through connections in his small hometown of Meadville, he got an appointment at the Cleveland Clinic that typically required a six-month wait.
The medical team ran extensive tests, including one where they placed an object that “smells like a Sharpie” in front of his nose to elevate his heart rate without physical exertion. Brown asked for the unvarnished truth.
“He [the doctor] sat down. He said, ‘Well, you told me not to sugarcoat. He’s like, You got the real deal. He said, You won’t be able to play football no more,’” Brown recalls.
His mother, Buffy, was in the room when the final verdict came down. She cried, and Brown had gone numb.
Penn State officially announced his medical retirement on Nov. 11, 20201.
Back in his dorm room, Brown asked his then—girlfriend—now wife—Dee to leave. He turned off his phone, lay down on the floor in the dark, and spent two days staring at the ceiling. People knocked; he didn’t answer. When they finally broke in to check on him, he was alive but broken.
“You realize, who rock with you, who don’t,” he says. “I never take it personally, because people have their own life, so them having to worry about me going through something if they want to continue to do what they doing. I one-hundred percent understand that.”
But some people showed up in ways that mattered. Trainer Andy Matnan sat with Brown for an hour without saying a word, just watching TV. Coach Seider stayed from daytime until nighttime, saying only “what’s up” when he arrived and “I love you” when he left.
Teammates and roommates Jaden Seider (Coach Seider’s son), Drew Hartlaub and Jonathan Sutherland put their arms around him. They prayed. They understood his pain didn’t require words.
“I was very numb, feeling wise, but I’m more of a I don’t feel love, essentially, I see it,” Brown reflects. “So I understood the people that were coming in, texting me, calling me, like those people love me because they showed like they did what I would do if they were in [my] position.”
The support showed him he had people who loved Journey Brown, not just the football player. But the grieving process stretched over a year, with moments where he’d watch practice, start crying and have to walk away.
To understand Brown’s resilience, you have to go back to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where Applebee’s counts as fine dining and athletic families like the Browns, Wossords, Gregors and Fosters produce athletes generation after generation.
Brown accumulated 7,027 career rushing yards and 113 touchdowns in high school while also competing in basketball and track. In one remarkable 2015 game, he ran for 722 yards and 10 touchdowns. But playing at a small school created doubt about the competition level when Penn State came calling.
“Coach Franklin had my stat sheets from my seasons. And he was like, ‘These stats are off the charts. You’ve been playing good. The only thing that scares us is you haven’t been playing nobody,’” Brown recalls.
At a Penn State camp, Brown made believers of the doubters. When Franklin called with the scholarship offer, the celebration revealed everything about his support system. His friends cried. His mother, sisters, aunt and cousins broke down. But the most important conversation happened with his grandmother.
Choosing between Penn State and Temple, she offered guidance wrapped in love: “I want you to stay close to home to me. So if I need you, you can get back to me.” Penn State was two hours away; Temple was six.
“She said, ‘Make a decision yourself.’ I said, ‘So I’m going to Penn State,’” Brown remembers with a warm smile.
Brown’s transition to Penn State proved challenging. After redshirting in 2017, he played in only nine games in 2018 with 44 rushing yards and a touchdown.
Then, as a redshirt sophomore in 2019, he started 10 of 13 games, rushing for 890 yards (fifth in the Big Ten) and 12 touchdowns (third in the Big Ten), plus one reception for a touchdown.
His Cotton Bowl performance against Memphis would be his final game — 202 yards on 16 carries, averaging 12.6 yards per carry, third-best in bowl history. Two touchdowns, including runs of 32 and 56 yards, earned him Offensive MVP honors.
Coach Charles Huff—Penn State’s running backs coach in 2017 and the main recruiter to bring Brown to Happy Valley—had pushed him to that level with tough love: “I’m here to break you, mentally, physically,” Brown recalls of Huff. “He said: If I can’t break you, nobody in the country will be able to break you.”
Brown survived the breaking. He was ascending toward greatness. That’s when his heart condition ended everything.
Today, Brown’s perspective reveals the depth of his small-town upbringing and his hippie mother’s wisdom, cultivated long before football fame. His mother taught him to “feel the energy in the room” and that “we never hate people, we love. If somebody is trying to kill you with hate, you kill them with kindness.”
Having experienced homelessness and poverty growing up, his goals now center on family: “What I want to do with my life is probably the same thing everyone wants to do. I just want to be able to make sure my kids get to live the life that I never got to. So for me, I want to make sure my kids don’t got to worry about nothing and be able to take care of my family and my peoples.”
He also wants to help others facing similar challenges and raise awareness about ACM: “I would like to get people to do testing and get their stuff done. And everybody’s gonna be scared, because what if you do have it? Then you gotta change your whole life, but at the same time, your life will change if you don’t get tested and you end up croaking.”
Perhaps most importantly, Brown has embraced living in the moment: “You gotta live for [today] because, you know, even with football, I thought it was gonna last forever and that shit was over in the [one] day. You know [what] I’m saying? So you gotta live in it now too.”
Brown supports former teammates, watches their games religiously and finds joy in simple things. People meet him now and never guess his football background.
“I like people not knowing, but then when they figure out, they’re like, ‘Oh, I would have never guessed he was a [football player],’” he says. “That’s what kind of makes me me, because my friends and my family never put me above anything, but I always held myself to the standard that I’m not better than nobody.”
His grandmother, who passed away in 2018, would be proud. She always knew there was more to Journey Brown than football statistics and scholarship offers. She saw the person he would become long before he did — someone who could find joy in simple conversations, strength in family bonds and purpose beyond the game that first brought him recognition.
In the end, that recognition of his full humanity, not just his athletic ability, may be Journey Brown’s greatest victory.
Due to COVID-19, the Big Ten postponed the start of its regular season schedule. Penn State’s first game was Oct. 24. ESPN reported on Oct. 20 that Brown could miss the 2020 season due to a “medical condition discovered during the offseason,” and the team confirmed that report.