TEMPE, Ariz. — After a recent practice, James Conner sat in the Cardinals practice facility and watched a replay of a defining moment from Arizona’s season.
On Oct. 27, the Cardinals took possession with five minutes left in the fourth quarter. They needed at least a field goal to beat the Miami Dolphins at Hard Rock Stadium.
Until then, Conner had had a rough day. Determined to stop the run, the Dolphins had held him to 24 yards on 13 carries. After four pass plays and a short Conner run, the Cardinals lined up on first down from midfield.
Conner took a handoff and burst through the line, breaking arm tackles. After 8 yards, four Miami defenders grabbed hold of the Arizona running back. He kept going. Five more yards. Still not down. Teammates rushed over and pushed the pile.
During a recent conversation with The Athletic, Conner smiled. “I’m really thinking, ‘Don’t go down,” he said of a rush that stretched 17 yards and led to a winning field goal.
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Entering Sunday’s game at Seattle, the Cardinals (6-4) have won four in a row to take sole possession of first place in the NFC West. Quarterback Kyler Murray might be playing his best football. A beat-up defense continues to improve. But Conner has always buzzed as Arizona’s primary power source. No offensive player better symbolizes the physical identity coach Jonathan Gannon has tried to instill.
“When he makes plays like that, it kind of takes energy away from the defense,” left tackle Paris Johnson Jr., said. “He’s getting the dirty yards. It takes the air out of the defense and that puts life into us.”
“It fires everybody up to go the extra mile,” tight end Tip Reiman said.
Growing up, Conner’s brothers always gave him simple instructions. Don’t ever let anybody trip you up. Don’t let one man bring you down. Make defenders earn it. Conner this season has played in such an aggressive manner. Per Pro Football Reference, he leads NFL running backs with 18 broken tackles. In addition, Conner has produced first downs on 29.6 percent of his carries, which trumps Baltimore’s Derrick Henry (26.4), Philadelphia’s Saquon Barkley (23.4) and Green Bay’s Josh Jacobs (22.2).
In the Cardinals facility, Conner watched as he held the ball tight in his right arm and stiff-armed a Miami defensive lineman with his left. As the Dolphins closed in, the eighth-year running back ducked his head, secured the ball with both arms and moved the pile, not giving in until his legs gave out.
“Physical, man,” Conner said. “That’s what got me here.”
Rachid Ibrahim monitored the Miami game from his office at the University of Richmond, where he coaches running backs for the Spiders. His takeaway that afternoon: James just doesn’t wear down. He’s physically strong. He’s in great shape. And he’s getting better.
Ibrahim and Conner go way back. They were in the 2013 recruiting class at the University of Pittsburgh, running backs who played as true freshmen. They roomed together on road trips and later shared a two-bedroom apartment. Years later, both can recite the address without a second’s thought: 3213 Ward Street.
Most of Conner’s college career has been well-documented. How he committed to Pitt as a defensive end but shifted to running back before training camp. How as a sophomore he rushed for 1,765 yards and 26 touchdowns, earning All-America recognition and ACC Player of the Year honors. How he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma not much later.
On July 25, 2016, Conner wrote an essay about his recovery for The Players’ Tribune. (First line: The first time you pee after receiving chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, it’s red.) Conner later wrote a book entitled: “Fear is a Choice: Tackling Life’s Challenges with Dignity, Faith and Determination.”
To this day, the mark Conner made in college has not faded. Former teammates and coaches marvel at his determination and spirit. Fans still wear Conner’s No. 24 jersey to home games. Perhaps most impressive: Pitt executive associate athletic director E.J. Borghetti named his youngest son after Conner.
“He’s one of the toughest, if not the toughest, people I know,” former Pitt offensive lineman Alex Officer said.
James Conner has 697 rushing yards and five touchdowns this season for the Cardinals, who have surged to the top of the NFC West. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
His workouts were legendary.
Former Pitt strength coach Ross Kolodziej, who played for the Cardinals for parts of three seasons, said Conner had an uncommon approach. From the first day, Conner wanted to know: What are we doing? How are we doing it? What’s this going to do for me? His consistency never wavered. His confidence was contagious. This applied to personal workouts as well, in and outside the Pitt facility.
In their apartment on Ward Street, Conner and Ibrahim had a pullup bar secured to a door frame, as well as a few 45-pound dumbbells and resistance bands. Nearly every night before bed, they’d do a quick circuit. Curls, 4 sets of 20. Pull-ups. One hundred pushups.
“James loved working out,” Ibrahim said. “That was his thing. That was his getaway. Some people hate running. Some people hate conditioning. He loved working out. That would never be punishment for him.”
“It was a little hole-in-the-wall apartment, but all the guys would always be coming over,” Conner said. “We just had our vision there of better days and where we wanted to go. That was definitely, like, our starting point.”
Conner added one more workout. On Fridays, after Pitt had its final walk-through prep session, he led a small group into the Pitt weight room. There, while coaches had meetings upstairs, the group would blare rap music and work for an hour.
“It was all accessory work,” former Pitt long snapper Pat Quirin said. “We never went in there and were like, ‘Let’s load up the squat bar; let’s dead lift.’ No. It was shoulders, biceps, triceps, maybe some grip work for forearms. But we were getting after it.”
“We all had kind of the same thought process behind it,” former Pitt linebacker Matt Galambos said. “You want to look good on Saturday in the jerseys.”
For Conner, the tradition never died.
“I still do that to this day,” he said. “That’s mandatory. You got to look good in uniform. That’s all that’s for. A little Muscle Beach.”
Stevan Ridley played eight seasons as an NFL running back. He had a similar bruising style as Conner. He tells people: When you wake up after a game Monday morning, you feel like you just went through a 24-hour cycle in the washing machine.
The weekly schedule then unfolds like this:
Monday and Tuesdays are recovery days. Wednesdays and Thursdays are the hardest days of practice. By Friday, a running back starts to feel like himself. Saturday, the excitement starts to build. Sunday, he’s gutting it out, trying to be the best he can be.
“Our bodies start going from 100 percent as soon as the whistle blows in (training) camp, and then you’re just holding on to try and make it through the back end of those (17) weeks,” Ridley said. “It’s brutal, man.”
In 2017, the Pittsburgh Steelers selected Conner in the third round of the NFL Draft. For his first two years as a pro, he teamed with Ridley, whose career was winding down. One thing that impressed Ridley: the time Conner spent taking care of his body.
“I saw a young man in his first contract handling his business like the veteran that he is now,” Ridley said. “He was doing acupuncture. He was going to these soaks where he’d sit in water and they’d pump oxygen into it, something I had never seen. He was so on top of his body.”
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After rushing for 122 yards in a Sept. 15 home win over the Los Angeles Rams this season, Conner drove to the Cardinals’ Dignity Health Training Center to get a headstart on treatment. (“It’s funny you say that because I think I called him that Sunday night and he was in the cold tub,” said Ibrahim, his former college roommate. “I said, ‘You’re at the facility?’”)
The day after Arizona beat San Francisco on Oct. 6, Gannon told reporters Conner already was there, the first player in the building so he could get an early start on leg maintenance.
These are habits Conner picked up during his time with the Steelers. He said he’d pull up to the facility early in the morning thinking he’d be the first to arrive only to discover vets James Harrison, David DeCastro, Maurkice Pouncey and Cameron Heyward already there, soaking in a tub or riding an exercise bike. Conner knew that if he wanted to last, he needed to start doing what they did.
“When he was a rook, man, he was trying to figure it out, for sure,” former Steelers fullback Roosevelt Nix said of Conner’s recovery work.
Today, Conner sets the example. The night before Arizona played the Los Angeles Chargers, with the team sitting at 2-4, he delivered a speech about maximizing opportunity. “Not a lot of volume, but the substance behind it, and what he’s preaching,” Murray said at the time, “when you get up there and you pour your heart out, guys feel it.”
Rookie running back Trey Benson said Conner is the best mentor he’s had in football. He’s shown him how to be a pro. How to be decisive with the ball. How to eat right. How to recover. How to attack the weight room.
“When I work out with him, I be sore. Not the next day, I’ll be sore the next hour,” Benson said. “He pushes me to a level I didn’t think I had.”
After watching the replay of his run against the Dolphins, Conner was asked when he realized all this was possible, getting to the NFL, playing at a high level. He said after he won ACC Player of the Year in 2014, he looked up all the previous winners. He noticed that many had gone on to play in the NFL. Jameis Winston, Tyrod Taylor, C.J. Spiller, Calvin Johnson.
He talked with Ibrahim, who told him: “You’re going to get a tryout, at least. Whether you get drafted or not, you don’t win that award and not get at least a shot at the NFL.”
If he got an opportunity, Conner said he knew what he would do with it. He would attack it like he did Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He would attack it like he does the weight room. He would attack it like he does each carry, running until his legs can’t run anymore.
He hasn’t stopped since.
(Top photo of James Conner talking to Cardinals teammates before an October game against Green Bay: Todd Rosenberg / Getty Images)
