ALLEN PARK, Mich. — On a Thursday afternoon well into the season, Lions coach Dan Campbell leaves his team with some encouraging words, the circle breaks and the players make their way from the practice field to the locker room.

One player, however, isn’t going anywhere.

Amon-Ra St. Brown starts running sprints as if they are routes in a no-huddle offense. He goes about 10 yards forward, 5 yards to the left or right and 10 yards ahead before jogging back to the starting point and beginning again.

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By the time he finishes the sprints, sweaty and breathing hard, he is one of the last remaining on the field. Then he walks to the sideline and turns on the Jugs machine, which makes a faint whirring sound. As the balls hit his hands, a clap and an echo.

St. Brown won’t leave the field until he catches 202 balls. He has done this almost every day since he was in high school. The number is 202 because he saw another player with good hands catching 200 balls, and he wanted to be better.

This commitment is why St. Brown, through 25 games, has caught more passes than any player in league history who was not selected in the first three rounds of the draft.

“He works like it’s the last day he’ll ever be able to play the game,” Campbell says. “Every rep he takes, he works the detail of the route. He catches and he finishes every play. There’s never a catch and then he just kind of glides through it. He’s trained himself that practice is very much game-like to him. His approach to the game is as good as I’ve been around.”

It’s almost too good. At times, Campbell acknowledges, he has to limit St. Brown’s practice reps — “save him from himself,” he says — because St. Brown wants to take every last one, and what’s most important is that he’s fresh for the game.

St. Brown understands his coach’s concerns. That’s why he sleeps eight or more hours nightly and nine or more the night before a game.

But when he pads up, he gives no thought to self-preservation.

“What makes Ra who he is isn’t what everybody sees,” says fellow Lions wide receiver Kalif Raymond, who is as close to him as anyone on the team. “It’s what people don’t see.”

This is what you saw: That 40-yard dash time of 4.61. St. Brown ran the 40 at USC’s pro day in the spring of 2021, and many NFL stopwatches had him at that time. At the combine that year, 48 receivers ran faster.

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This is what you didn’t see: St. Brown running his practice routes so intensely that he looks like the most challenging player to cover on the field.

St. Brown believes getting open and making plays is about more than a 40-yard dash time, so he works on his route running — really works.

His position coach, Antwaan Randle El, says St. Brown’s route running is one of his finest attributes.

“He gets in and out of routes really fast,” Randle El says. “For him to stop only takes him ‘pop-pop’ versus ‘pop-pop, pop-pop, pop-pop’ for most guys.”

He is in the upper tier of receivers at stop and start, change of direction, acceleration, body control and ability to get off the line — skills that are especially helpful in the slot, where St. Brown makes his living.

St. Brown also is proficient at theater.

“As a receiver, I feel we’re actors out there,” he says. “We have to make the DBs believe we’re doing something we’re not. If we want to go left, we have to make them think we want to go right. The whole position is almost like an art to me.”

The other way he offsets what he lacks in speed is with resoluteness, which is evident in a stare that could level a defender.

Campbell was on the receiving end of it after one of St. Brown’s first practices. Campbell told him if he wanted a job, he could have it if he earned it.

“The way he looked at me, you could tell he believed it,” Campbell says.

At USC, St. Brown was a day-one starter after being a five-star recruit. But in the NFL, 16 wide receivers were drafted before he went in the fourth round.

“I can name all 16 if you want me to,” he says.

We settle on the four he had never heard of before the draft.

“D’Wayne Eskridge, Nico Collins, Dez Fitzpatrick, Josh Palmer,” he says.

St. Brown has the 16 names written on his notebook, and he reviews them before every practice. At the end of every football Sunday, he checks the box scores to see how each did.

As Lions general manager Brad Holmes prepared for the 2021 draft, he thought more about St. Brown’s intangibles than his lack of track speed.

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Before coming to Detroit, Holmes was part of the Rams front office that drafted Cooper Kupp in the third round despite Kupp running a 4.62 40-yard dash.

“It was easy to envision with Amon-Ra because we were around Kupp,” says Holmes, who had a third-round grade on St. Brown. “I’m not saying he’s Kupp, but watching him play, he reminded me of Kupp and Robert Woods. They aren’t the fastest, but they are very quick and sudden, explosive in a short area and physical.”

This is what you saw: St. Brown setting an NFL record with at least eight catches and a touchdown in eight straight games.

This is what you didn’t see: St. Brown possibly setting a record in team meetings by asking more questions than any player in Lions history.

“He’s asking questions through the meeting, and he’s asking questions afterwards,” Randle El says. “Always questions.”

If you want to understand how a fourth-round receiver can be so productive, you have to understand how his mind works.

“He’s not just, ‘OK, you want me to go run this route and I’m going to go run it,'” Campbell says. “He knows why and what the outside receiver is doing to help this route or what his route is doing to open up the next receiver and why the depth is important, why I need to stop here, why my split needs to be here.”

Despite limited time on task, the 23-year-old rarely beats himself. Last season when St. Brown led his team in receptions and receiving yards, he had only three busts, the fewest of any receiver on the Lions, according to Randle El. Quarterback Jared Goff said St. Brown plays “mistake-free pretty much.”

With a wink, St. Brown tells his coaches he has a photographic memory. He may be stretching the truth, but he clearly is different from most in terms of recall.

The son of an American father and a German mother, St. Brown was multilingual before he was potty-trained. Growing up in California, St. Brown learned English from his father, John Brown, while his mother, Miriam Brown, spoke to her children only in German even though she’s fluent in English. When he was 4, St. Brown also started learning French.

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Understanding different languages at a young age has helped him digest football information, St. Brown believes.

“I process things really quick,” he says. “When I see a play, it takes me 10 seconds to know it, and I probably won’t forget it. So when I’m out there, I don’t think too much. I’m just playing fast.”

This is what you saw: St. Brown blocking Bears cornerback Duke Shelley to the ground last season. And then blocking Shelley to the ground again after Shelley got up.

This is what you didn’t see: St. Brown lifting weights at the Lions facility with linebackers and running backs, not wide receivers. St. Brown trains with players who outweigh him by 20 to 40 pounds because they usually load the same plates on the bar that he does.

And when the workout is over and the other players move on, St. Brown remains in the weight room, where he finishes every lifting session with 200 crunches.

When Randle El saw St. Brown throw a block that buried a defender, he started calling him “Hulk.” As far as we know, St. Brown has not been exposed to gamma rays, but like the big green fella, he is absurdly strong.

“He lifts sometimes, and I’m like, ‘Dude, you can’t be putting that much weight on the bar at this point of the season,'” Raymond says. “Nobody else is.”

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, given he started weight training in kindergarten and was trained by his father, a two-time Mr. Universe and three-time Mr. World.

His father also started him early on a red-meat diet. St. Brown still eats red meat daily, and he plays like it.

His affection for blocking began at Mater Dei High School when opponents belittled him and his brother Osiris, a teammate at the time. The St. Brown boys decided to punish the offending players, so they ran them over, then blocked them into a sideline bench. It was, he discovered, amusing and gratifying.

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“Now I love blocking,” says St. Brown, 6-foot and 199 pounds. “It puts fear in the DB’s heart, depending on who he is. I feel I can block anyone; I don’t care who it is. I might not get it done every time, but I’m going to make sure he feels everything I have. I especially love blocking bigger guys because they always try to take it easy or think I’m not going to do much.”

The mentality reminds Randle El of his former Steelers teammate Hines Ward, known as one of the best blocking receivers ever.

“I go back to talking about a football player,” Randle El says. “That’s what Hines was. The toughness they both have, that’s the comparison. If the rules today were like back in the day, they’d be changing them because of this guy (St. Brown).”

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Last season, St. Brown collected the Lions’ wide receivers pot of $600 for having the most “knockdown” blocks. He believes blocking is 80 percent desire and 20 percent technique.

St. Brown has his father’s strength. But more significantly, he has his will.

It has not been the easiest season for St. Brown. The Lions lost six of their first seven games and he sprained his ankle and then sustained a concussion. He subsequently didn’t play much over a three-game stretch and sat out a game for the first time since he was a sophomore in high school.

But now the Lions have won two straight as underdogs and St. Brown had 14 catches for 174 yards in those games. The resiliency, toughness and determination that have been evident lately in St. Brown are the reasons he is a Lion.

In their first draft, Holmes and Campbell were looking for gritty, physical players who could help define their team. They found one with the 112th pick.

“He fits what we’re about,” Holmes says of the California kid who seems so at home in the city that gave us pickup trucks and muscle cars. “He just happens to play the wide receiver position. He’s a building block.”

This is what you saw: In a drill during his first padded practice as an NFL player, St. Brown responded to the aggressive tactics of Lions cornerback Ifeatu Melifonwu by throwing a few haymakers.

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This is what you didn’t see: St. Brown cracking up the room with a spot-on imitation of Randle El.

As the youngest of three brothers, St. Brown has been standing up for himself almost as long as he’s been standing up.

“I always had that fighter in me,” he says. “Excuse my language, but I’m no p—-. If anybody tests me, I’m not afraid to fight anyone.”

As much as he is a threat to lead the league in combativeness, St. Brown also can lighten the mood in the locker room. Raymond says he has a switch that flips.

St. Brown and Lions receiver DJ Chark have gone back and forth about the size of their heads. Chark tells St. Brown his considerable noggin reminds him of a balloon. St. Brown chirps back, saying Chark’s undersized head could fit on a dime.

When St. Brown gets a barb in, he cracks a little smile and looks back over his shoulder.

St. Brown’s eagerness to laugh, as well as his willingness to fight, makes his teammates grateful he’s on their side.

St. Brown, his father’s son in many ways, probably could have made his name on a Las Vegas stage, spray-tanned, oiled-up and posing in a front lat spread. But he has always been drawn to competing as part of a team.

Goff, who worked with St. Brown in the offseason in California, has called him a “friendly target” because he comes back to the ball, catches away from his body, understands what Goff is looking for and always is where he’s supposed to be.

St. Brown also earns his quarterback’s trust because he doesn’t often drop passes. According to Randle El, St. Brown had only two drops in 2021. His two-season catch rate of 75.6 percent is sixth best in the league among receivers with at least 80 targets, according to TruMedia.

St. Brown credits it to his work on the Jugs machine. “If I drop a ball, I’m not worried about it,” he says. “I’ve caught so many balls in my lifetime that one is not going to affect me. I’m on to the next play.”

This is what you saw: St. Brown dancing in the end zone after a 26-yard touchdown run against the Seahawks last season.

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This is what you didn’t see: St. Brown practicing the dance in the Lions locker room and in his living room the week before the game.

St. Brown loves to dance. When he was a kid, he tried to imitate Michael Jackson’s moves. Now he learns his moves on TikTok. He says he can learn a dance by practicing it about 10 times. St. Brown taught Raymond to do “The Smeeze.”

.@amonra_stbrown going 🆙#WASvsDET | 📺 FOX pic.twitter.com/9ZOSRFiP6s

— Detroit Lions (@Lions) September 18, 2022

When John Brown participated in bodybuilding competitions, he was a revolutionary in that he incorporated dance moves into his poses. So dancing isn’t just letting loose for his son. It’s part of being a professional.

Now St. Brown goes into every game with a dance prepared for a touchdown, which he expects to score.

His touchdown dances don’t just happen.

St. Brown makes them happen — sprint by sprint, catch by catch from the Jugs machine, question by question and crunch by crunch.

(Top photo: Jeffrey Becker / USA Today)

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