The Important Stuff
As much as receptions over defenders or screens taken to the house might feature in NFL highlight videos, the real source of receiver value in the NFL continues to be the ability to separate against man coverage. This is what makes the very best guys worth the money, and is something that can come about in two ways. First, having the speed to outrun whoever a team puts on you, forcing help over the top – Johnson is fast, but he’s not that fast. Second, and how guys like Odell Beckham and Antonio Brown generate their value, is through the ability to get off the line against press and to separate with route running.
If you can do this, you will have a future in the NFL. So how does Johnson get on in this regard?
In general, Johnson’s release off the line is very good, as he uses his natural foot quickness to good effect in combination with an understanding of how to set up defenders with an initial move in order to generate release with his counter. Here, he uses a subtle outside move to get the defensive back to turn his hips outside before breaking back inside for the easy release:
And here he does the opposite, hesitating inside before breaking outside the defender:
He also did a nice job when the defender sat off nicely in an attempt to take away the vertical route, such as in the following case. He does this by taking a half-step inside before crossing the face of the defender for an outside release – the impressive thing here is not just that he is able to do this but the amount of momentum he is able to conserve in doing so:
Of course, footwork is only half of what goes into getting release off the line, as the hands have to work with the feet, and while this something that Johnson generally did very well, this is something he could do with improving his consistency. On both of the following plays, he shows the simplest form of this, where he takes a step to one side of the defender and then uses his defender-side arm to brush the pressing arm of the defender, allowing for an easy release:
However, on the next play, the defender is able to secure the hand before Johnson is able to knock his arm aside, making it harder for him to turn the corner and get vertical. This is far from a disaster and nobody is going to get this right every time, but this is something that Johnson will need to be aware of as he transitions to the NFL where more teams will look to press him in order to limit his ability to get into his routes.
With that being said, he did show a pretty nice counter to the hard-punch approach to press coverage:
OK, so he can get off the line, and as good as that is in terms of allowing him to get vertical quickly, how does he fare when he is asked to generate underneath separation?
It is hard to get too over-excited in this regard, as Toledo hardly ran the complete route tree, with a lot of Johnson’s work being done on a small number of fairly basic routes. However, with that being said, what he did show was an ability to use his speed to his advantage, to work effectively at the head of routes, and a number of reasonably subtle touches to generate that big more separation.
The easiest way for a receiver like Johnson to generate separation, especially against off coverage, is by threatening the vertical route before breaking back to the ball. This is most easily done against off-man where the receiver just has to wait for the defender to turn his hips before he breaks back:
But can also be effective against cover three where the corner against has to turn to cover his deep third allowing the receiver to sit down underneath the zone for an easy reception:
The other promising thing Johnson shows here – especially on the second play where the head of the route is visible – is the speed with which he is able to decelerate and the smoothness with which he is then able to return to motion, similar to the fluidity he showed in getting release earlier on.
He also shows an ability to generate separation at the head of the route, similar to what CMC does so well on the option routes he often runs out of the backfield, where he is running directly at the defender in off-coverage with his break being to one side. Here, he doesn’t directly break, a mistake often made by college receivers, but instead hesitates in order to free the feet of the defender before breaking to one side. The head of the route isn’t entirely visible on the following plays, but it should be clear the way in which he is able to generate this separation:
Finally, he also shows some nice subtleties in terms of his understanding of how to generate separation. While a number of college receivers run stutter-and-goes similar to this:
What separates Johnson from many of the others is the way in which he doesn’t just drop a shoulder inside, but actually takes a full step inside before breaking outside – and does so with minimal loss of momentum, thereby giving him a distinct velocity advantage coming out of his break. The other thing that impressed me on tape is the way he used his body to generate separation at break points. On the following play, the defender is in good position to defend the underneath route knowing he has help over the top, but Johnson is able to generate enough separation to make the catch by voluntarily initiating contact before his break, thereby allowing him to ever-so-subtly push off from the defender using his elbow and shoulder:
The key here is that he doesn’t extend an arm to do this, making it almost impossible for the referee to throw the flag as it is hard to say who initiated the contact in real time.
Johnson will have something of a learning curve as he moves to a much larger route tree in the NFL, but if his college tape is anything to go by, he has an unusual ability to conserve momentum through breaks which, when combined with a sharp change in direction and an understanding of how routes get him open, gives him a good chance of developing into a very good route runner in the NFL.
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