Make no mistake. Ben Johnson is not what you’d call a normal offensive genius. Ever since the rise of Don Coryell and Bill Walsh in the 1980s, the label for young offensive wizards has always been guys who build their identity around passing the football. It was true of Mike Holmgren in the 1990s, Mike Martz in the 2000s, Andy Reid in the 2010s, and Sean McVay in the 2020s. However, Johnson is a rather significant departure from those names. He has developed a specialty for crafting a diverse and lethal running game, perhaps the most deadly in the NFL today.
It is hard to understand where this came from. After all, Johnson was a quarterback in his youth and played that position all the way through college. It would make perfect sense for him to become a pass-first enthusiast. Instead, he developed an old-school mentality sprinkled with creative flair. Where did it come from? Johnson finally revealed the truth during an interview with Peter Schrager of ESPN. The origins of it all stem from his time in high school at A.C. Reynolds in North Carolina.
Ben Johnson learned that winning often occurred when you ran well.
He was the starting quarterback for A.C. as a junior in 2002. The Rockets went 14-1, led by a dominant ground attack, and won the state championship. A year later, they went 11-4 and reached the state semifinals again. This experience carried over into college. During his four years at North Carolina, Ben Johnson routinely watched dominant rushing teams win. It was true of USC, Texas, Florida, and LSU on a national level, and Virginia Tech in the ACC Conference he played in. Running the ball well led to success.
Then you have his arrival in the NFL. Johnson spent his first seven years with the Miami Dolphins. Their most successful season, 2016, saw them rank 9th in rushing. So the lessons had been stacking up for years. When he finally got his chance to run an offense of his own, Johnson combined that knowledge with his own high intelligence to create a monster. In an NFL landscape overrun with pass-first systems, his run-heavy shift has left many defenses scrambling for solutions that don’t exist.
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