Allen Park — In one year as the Detroit Lions offensive coordinator and primary play-caller, Ben Johnson transformed one of the NFL’s worst units into one of the league’s best, despite minimal upgrades to the team’s personnel.
The success of Detroit’s offense, which increased its year-to-year scoring output by nearly 40% behind the vastly improved play of quarterback Jared Goff, thrust Johnson into the spotlight, moving his resume toward the top of the stack for franchises looking for a new head coach this past offseason. The market for a bright, forward-thinking offensive minds in the vein of Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan remains a red-hot trend, given the success that duo has had in Los Angles and San Francisco, respectively.
But despite interest from three teams, Johnson didn’t land a top job, pulling out of the process early to tend to unfinished business in Detroit. Returning for a fifth season after working his way up from a quality-control role in 2019, Johnson sees the potential to accomplish something special with the Lions. And if his career remains on its current trajectory, there will undoubtedly be other opportunities to become a head coach in the future for the 37-year-old.
Different this time?
Optimism is near an all-time high as the Lions enter the 2023 season. Admittedly, hope always springs eternal this time of year, but this round of hype feels justified, in large part due to expectations for the offense. Unlike the previous offseason, Johnson has been provided a notable influx of talent, headlined by a revamped backfield and rookie tight end with an impressive ceiling as a pass-catcher. A repeat of last season’s production feels like the floor.
Of course, many Lions fans are inherently skeptical. There have been countless times they’ve been told a corner is being turned only to find it leads directly into a brick wall. The team looked on the brink of becoming an offensive juggernaut under Scott Linehan in 2011, only to fail cracking the top 10 in scoring again until 2017.
That was Jim Bob Cooter’s second full season as offensive coordinator. Like Johnson, he was a promising young coach, but one crowned prematurely as an up-and-comer in the industry. Four years after being let go by the Lions, following a dismal, injury-plagued showing in 2018, he’s finally worked his way back into another coordinator opportunity with the Colts.
So what is the reason to believe things will be different with Johnson? It’s his amorphous scheme that’s a still-evolving amalgamation of influences he’s encountered along his football journey, which gives him and the Lions the flexibility to attack each opponent in a unique way and effortlessly pivot on the fly when required.
Standard set early
Johnson’s first influence was his father, Don, who coached collegiately at Idaho State and the Citadel before choosing family over the never-ending hours football demands at that level. He continued to coach high schoolers, first at Scotland High in Laurinburg, North Carolina, before taking a coordinator role under legendary prep coach Bobby Poss at A.C. Reynolds, four hours west in Asheville.
As a kid, Ben attended home games, but road matchups often went beyond bed time. He remembers waiting up for his dad to come home, and after one game, he ran outside to meet him in the driveway, eager to know if Reynolds had won.
Don’s unexpected response left a lasting impact.
“He said, ‘Whoa son, that’s the wrong question. The question is how much did we win by?'” Ben Johnson said. “That always stuck with me because it was like, wow, wasn’t expecting that. And it kind of played that way throughout my career in high school. That was our standard. It wasn’t, are we going to win this week, but by how much?”
Amusingly, prior to naming Johnson Detroit’s play-caller last season, Lions coach Dan Campbell sarcastically said he’d gladly hand over the reins to the offense in the team scored 84 points in their preseason opener. Unironically, that’s probably what Johnson was trying to do, even if he didn’t have the luxury of starters playing in that game.
Regardless, it should be comforting to know that curated aggression overlaps with Campbell’s, meaning the Lions are never likely to take the foot off the gas, a flaw possessed by too many NFL coaches.
The other lasting lesson from Dad came from a halftime speech, when Ben was quarterbacking Reynolds and the team had fallen behind its rival, Charles D. Owen High School.
“We were getting waxed at the half and he got up and talked to the team,” Ben said. “I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I remember telling my mom, ‘He talked to those guys like he was talking to me, like he was talking to his kids.’ It was stern, it was demanding, it was telling them to not feel sorry for themselves. It was special because you were able to tell how he viewed those guys in that locker room.”
‘Hard coaching’
Johnson’s playing career was forgettable. Sure, he won a 4-A state championship at Reynolds in 2002, but only threw three passes in the title game, completing two, including an 11-yard touchdown in the 14-7 victory. As you might imagine, quarterbacks who only throw three times don’t exactly rack up recruiting offers, which left Johnson to walk-on at the University of North Carolina.
He never saw a snap at quarterback for the Tar Heels. He had been told he was going to play against Notre Dame in 2006, but starter Joe Dailey kept things closer than expected with three touchdown passes, keeping Johnson on the bench.
But he did see some time on special teams, including a highlight too good not to share.
“We’re playing Georgia Tech and I remember going in that week and they give you the scouting report and the types of blocks,” Johnson said. “I look down, I’ve got this guy on this block and it says, ‘Defensive lineman, 6-7, 270 pounds.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa, you guys want me to block 6-7, 270 pounds?’ It was a guy by the name of Michael Johnson, who went on to play for the Cincinnati Bengals for a long time.
“So fast forward to the game, I said, ‘I’m overmatched, so screw it,'” Johnson continued. “So I line up across from this guy and I shoot out the gate and get underneath him, get my hands on his breast plate and end up throwing him onto the ground. The entire sideline is going crazy because they all knew the mismatch. You could say that’s the highlight of my special teams career right there. Big (Lions special teams coordinator) Dave Fipp play right there.”
Once he exhausted his eligibility, Johnson quickly transitioned into coaching, taking a grad assistant role at Boston College. There, he’d work under offensive coordinator Gary Tranquill, who had (lightly) recruited Johnson while in the same role at North Carolina.
When you start digging into coaching trees, you’re bound to find some fascinating connections. Tranquill had played college football at Wittenberg University under Bill Edwards, who had coached for the Lions more than a decade earlier. As a coach, Tranquill demanded his players strive for perfection and was anything but passive when they fell short of that standard. He had worked with Bill Belichick and Nick Saban during his career and there was an overlap in their styles.
“He taught me how to handle hard coaching,” Johnson said. “That wasn’t something I experienced a ton, but here I was in college, and it didn’t matter that I was a walk-on. If it didn’t look the way he envisioned, the hat was being thrown on the ground. This isn’t a big man. He’s a small guy and he kind of looks like Yoda. He’s got these ears that stick out a little bit and that hat would be thrown off and he would just dog cuss you.
“That forced you to get some thick skin, and as a quarterback, that was really important because you can’t let the outside noise influence how you’re playing,” Johnson continued. “That helped me as a player and it’s certainly helped me as a coach, seeing that kind of coaching style, with complete transparency and honesty with the people around you. And when it’s not good enough, letting them know it’s not good enough.”
Inspiration and influences
Before joining Tranquill at Boston College, Johnson worked with two more coordinators while playing quarterback at North Carolina; Frank Cignetti and John Shoop. And even though he only spent a year with the latter, Johnson points to Shoop as the reason he went into coaching.
“Being around him, that was the first time I looked at it and said, ‘That’s who I want to be like,'” Johnson said. “Everything from the energy he brought every day to it didn’t matter who you were in the room, he was going to treat you really well.”
Shoop spent a dozen years in the NFL prior to taking the North Carolina job. After that, he went on to serve as the offensive coordinator at Purdue, but he’s interestingly working as a teacher and position coach at Johnson’s old high school. His empathy and compassion, which Johnson adored, might be one of the reasons Shoop is out of college coaching. According to a story from the “The Guardian,” Shoop publicly supported players both earning money off their name and likeness, as well as some social justice causes, which ruffled feathers at both North Carolina and Purdue.
Beyond the personal traits he was developing, the rapid expansion of Johnson’s football mind began in 2011 when Kevin Rogers replaced Tranquill as Boston College’s offensive coordinator. Rogers, who had been Brett Favre’s position coach the previous two years in Minnesota, brought the Minnesota Vikings’ playbook with him to B.C.
“It was probably triple the size of anything I’d experienced before,” Johnson said. “It’s substantial, and the nuances for the protections, this and that, it’s a lot for a college player to digest.”
From there, the connections Johnson made at Boston College paved his path into the NFL, starting as a low-level assistant on Joe Philbin’s staff in Miami, where Johnson would stick around for seven seasons, getting a graduate degree in offensive schematics along the way.
With the Dolphins, Johnson crossed paths with the likes of Al Saunders, Mike Martz, Bill Lazor, Adam Gase, Mike Sherman, Clyde Christensen and Zac Taylor. That’s a staggering well of experience across an expanse of schematic backgrounds.
Sherman deployed another variant of the West Coast offense first introduced through Rogers’ playbook. Lazor brought Martz’s digit system that had set the NFL on fire with the Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf,” marrying it with Chip Kelly’s progressive RPO rushing attack. And Gase and Christensen had extensive experience working with Peyton Manning, who had been running an evolved system originally developed by former Lions offensive coordinator Tom Moore.
And Johnson readily took something from all of them. Sherman hammered home the value of tempo with a no-huddle component to his offense, while Lazor and Christensen refined Johnson’s value on details. Lazor made his coaches, including Johnson, create a written guide on fundamentals, technique and drills for the quarterback position. Years later, Christensen would similarly expand Johnson’s understanding of another offensive position.
“He showed me, as a coach, the importance of technique and fundamentals,” Johnson said. “I know every coach talks about that, but as a young coach, really nailing down what you believe in takes some time. He really helped me along that way. I knew what I believed in with quarterbacks, but now I’m in the receiver room. He’s had experience with both positions, and he’s able to help guide and shape me that way with what good receiver play looks like, the fundamentals of that position, how you train them in the offseason and training camp to get the results you’re looking for in the season.”
Finally, from Gase, Johnson developed a better understanding of game planning, particularly how to attack an opponent’s weakness, which was the coach’s specialty.
Learning and listening
Johnson landed in Detroit in 2019 on the back of a recommendation from Rogers to former Vikings colleague Darrell Bevell, who was serving as the Lions offensive coordinator. And Johnson was one of the few coaches to survive the regime change when Campbell came on board because the two had worked together four years in Miami under Philbin, through Campbell finishing out the 2015 season as the franchise’s interim head coach.
Serving as the assistant in charge of tight ends to begin the 2021 campaign, Johnson got an in-season promotion to pass-game coordinator, coinciding with Anthony Lynn being stripped of play-calling duties. That also served as an unofficial audition for the offensive coordinator role Johnson would assume last year.
In that position, Johnson has unleashed a multiple and versatile scheme that is a concoction of the things he’s experienced from his past. The three biggest influences are Rogers and Bevell’s West Coast offense, the Manning offense learned through Gase and Christensen and Martz’s digit passing attack.
But the overriding principle of the entire operation comes from Shoop, Johnson’s inspiration to enter coaching.
“One of the first slides we talk about with our identity is we want everything to look the same — we want the same things to look different and different things to look the same,” Johnson said. “That was a John Shoop phrase. I don’t think I’ve heard another coach say those same words since then, but it’s always resonated with me.”
That’s how Detroit keeps opponents off-balance under Johnson. Instead of having hundreds of formations on their weekly call sheet, the Lions enter each matchup with around 20, and several different play calls stemming from each look. The next week, they’ll swap out most of those formations, presenting something entirely different. And even if they keep a formation from one week to the next, or bring it back later in the season, it’s unlikely the play designs off of it will be the same.
“We have to be really good as a coaching staff on our self-scout, knowing what we put out there on tape so that we can use whatever,” Johnson said. “Whatever we think they’re practicing, we want to use that against them.”
The offense is wildly complex, but by condensing formations, as well as the verbiage attached to each play call, it decreases how much information Detroit’s players need to remember each week, allowing them to play faster.
Another key to Johnson’s success is his ability to collaborate. Ideas can come from anywhere, which has been a noted component of Andy Reid’s success in Kansas City and Philadelphia. Senior offensive assistant John Morton (now in Denver) brought some of Jon Gruden’s concepts to the table last year. There’s a healthy dose of McVay in there from Goff’s time wit the Rams. The Lions scored a touchdown against Minnesota with a play design Campbell borrowed from Sean Payton in New Orleans. And that hook-and-ladder that sealed the season-ending win that knocked Green Bay out the playoffs, that game plan suggestion came courtesy assistant wide receivers coach Seth Ryan.
And Johnson is always actively looking to evolve his playbook, which factors into the assistant coaches he’s added to his staff. Running backs coach Scottie Montgomery has brought new ideas to the ground game this offseason, while tight ends coach Steve Heiden has introduced Johnson to some concepts learned working under Bruce Arians and Kliff Kingsbury in Arizona. It all adds an exponential component to the system’s already impressive multiplicity.
On top of it all, Johnson listens to his players. When DJ Chark told him the opposing cornerback was sitting on short routes, Johnson called some successful deep shots for the receiver. When D’Andre Swift told Johnson he was feeling it and wanted the ball, Johnson fed it to the back and got a critical fourth-quarter touchdown against Chicago. And when Taylor Decker came to the sideline and said an opponent couldn’t stop the wide zone, Johnson called the play to Decker’s side five times in a row to seal a victory.
Giving everyone a voice builds buy-in. That’s why Johnson hates the idea of framing this as his offense. In his mind, it’s the Lions’ offense, and the sense of ownership that’s being cultivated is what’s fueling the results.
“All I really want is for our coaches and our players to take ownership that it’s ours, it’s us and it’s what do we do the best,” Johnson said. “That’s what we’re going to major in and we have to find ways to keep defenses honest and on their toes as much as we can.”
So far, so good. And if the Lions can keep the league’s defenses on their toes, achieving heights long dreamed about by this fan base, Johnson likely won’t have to wait much longer for a head coaching opportunity to present itself.
jdrogers@detroitnews.com
Twitter/X: @Justin_Rogers