Rodney Garner nearly swerved off the road.

Five-star defensive tackle Derrick Brown out of Sugar Hill, Ga. — the No. 3 player in the country at his position in the 2016 class — had been a silent commitment to Garner’s defensive line at Auburn for some time.

But Brown had a change of heart, as Garner said many young players do to some degree or another during their commitment, in the weeks leading up to National Signing Day. Garner, who at the time was in his fourth year as Auburn’s defensive line coach, got the first phone call from Brown’s parents while he was on the road. They were upset, he said. They wanted Brown to be a Tiger. The 18-year-old superstar DT had convinced himself the grass was greener elsewhere.

Garner could stomach that call, though, glad that Brown’s parents had given him a heads up. But the next time his phone rang was enough to fluster him emotionally and physically.

“It's Derrick on the phone. He says he wants to break the news to me that he's not coming to Auburn, and I almost wrecked,” Garner said last month in a video interview with both Carolina Panthers and Auburn media members.

Luckily for Garner and Auburn’s defenses in the years following, he pulled over and “rectified” the situation with Brown, who — obviously — signed with Auburn’s 2016 recruiting class.

“Rodney left one thing out, now,” Auburn defensive coordinator Kevin Steele said on the same call. “He said when he called, he had pull over and get things rectified. That rectified meant he had to call 9-1-1. They had to resuscitate to him.

“Not literally, but figuratively. He had a mild heart attack.”

Garner was so concerned, so shaken, so in disbelief at the possibility of losing Brown on his defensive line because he felt he had a future NFL stud on his hands. And the 1988 Auburn alum knows a thing or two about those.

Twenty draft picks — including Brown going No. 7 overall to the Panthers and defensive end Marlon Davidson going in the second round to the Falcons in this year’s draft — and numerous other eventual NFL players have been produced by Garner’s defensive lines through stints at Tennessee, Georgia and now his current role at Auburn.

That includes six first-rounders. And Garner believes Brown can have the best NFL career out of all of them.

Brown, a 6-foot-5, 325-pounder whose gravity alone was enough to elicit double teams in college, was one of the most decorated players in Auburn history last year with unanimous All-America honors, along with an SEC Defensive Player of the Year nod and numerous national recognitions for off- and on-field award nomination.

“He's been coached like a pro on a college field,” Steele said of Brown. “That has helped him expedite his process.”

He was also one of the best interior defenders in the country following the 2018 season and could have declared for the draft and been a likely first-rounder as a junior. But the prospect of leading Auburn’s defense as a senior stalwart was much too enticing to Brown, who always sees his endeavors through to the end — whether it’s tackling a running back or closing out a college career.

“Derrick is a finisher, just like he finished this season,” Steele said. “He came back, played in the bowl game. He didn't have to play in the bowl game. And that in itself is the focus of it — in everything he does, in the way he was developed as a young man at home and the way he was developed by Coach Garner — he is a finisher. That's probably the biggest thing about him.”

And that’s what drew new Panthers head coach Matt Rhule to Brown with the team’s top-10 selection. Rhule has been straightforward in his desire to overhaul Carolina’s defense — he made history in the 2020 draft by using all of the team's picks on defensive players — and to him, that starts with a franchise talent at one of the most critical positions in the game.

But it’s highly unlikely Brown was leaving the top 10 anyway. The fact that the Panthers’ new offensive coordinator Joe Brady had to scheme against Brown last year when he was LSU’s passing game guru also didn’t hurt. Brady said following the draft the Auburn DT was the only player LSU’s historically powerful offense had to scheme around all season.

“We often jokingly call the SEC the ‘other division in the NFL,’ and that’s evident in the fact I think there were a couple offensive linemen that Derrick lined up against taken in the first round,” Steele said. “He’s played against the best in college football, in our opinion, week in and week out. Obviously, if you want to be the best, you got to play against the best. That has made all of our players throughout the league, but certainly Derrick would tell you it’s made him a better player, too.”

Garner said he’s often asked to compare Brown to similar, elite talents along the defensive line that he’s coached over the years, particularly Richard Seymour and Marcus Stroud, both of whom played for Garner at Georgia.

Seymour has a laundry list of NFL achievements — including an appearance on the league’s 2000s All-Decade team and seven Pro Bowl appearances — and will be a Hall of Famer one day. Stroud went to three Pro Bowls.

Brown is a better player heading into his rookie NFL campaign than both, according to Garner. Why? In answering, Garner gave a summation of what Brown meant to Auburn’s defense for four years, and why that type of production is unmatched by any player he’s seen in the past.

“He made so many just unbelievable plays,” Garner said when asked to name his favorite sequence of Brown’s career in the orange and blue. “It's hard for me to identify just one. That's what really stood out to me about Derrick when I was talking to somebody earlier today and they were asking me, 'Okay, compare Derrick to Richard and Marcus at this stage.' And the thing about it — I really feel like, and this is a statement he's going to have to really live up to with Richard already on the Hall of Fame ballot and everything — but at this stage, I feel like he's a better player at this stage.

“He imposed his will on pretty much every opponent we played this year. It's hard to find many bad clips. And it's hard to find many big men that play like he did with the relentlessness that he did — pursuing the ball, the extra effort, pushing the pocket, diving over guys to make the extra plays. You know, when you turn on his film, there's so many wow plays, sometimes during the season, we'd get so busy, we'd take it for granted and we didn't really appreciate it until we're going back and looking at his cut ups. And you're sitting there like, man, it's going to be a lot — I'm going to have to be much better coach going forward, because it's going to be really hard to replace that kind of production.”

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