Extra Points: Numbers Game

By Lee Pace

What a time in the spring of 2008 for a young math and computer whiz to take his sheepskin out into the world, particularly into the nexus of the tech-savvy region known as the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. That year, Apple introduced the App Store along with the iPhone 3. Google previewed the Chrome browser. Sun Microsystems juiced its Java program with SE 6.

Ben Johnson was in the thick of the global tech game with his job with eTeleNext, a software development company with headquarters in downtown Durham. He had the trappings of an up-and-coming tech professional—a B.A. from the University of North Carolina in math and computer science, a work cubical and a 9-to-5 paycheck.

Still, something tugged at him.

Johnson was gifted with intelligence (top 10 in his class academically through A.C. Reynolds High School) and athleticism (starting quarterback on the Rockets' 2002 state 4-A title team). He walked on and played four years on the Tar Heel football team from 2004-07 as a backup to Darian Durant, Matt Baker, Joe Dailey, Cam Sexton and T.J. Yates, contributing mostly as a scout team quarterback, occasionally on special teams and definitely as the smartest guy in any room.

But he missed the trappings of the athletic world as he entered adulthood—the competition of the playing field, the goofiness of the locker room, the mental gymnastics of film study and X-and-O doodling. Johnson still had one foot in his past as he started his career after commencement in 2008, as he was still living in a house on Coolidge Street just south of campus with a half dozen Tar Heel football players and working in the evenings as a math tutor with various Carolina athletes.

"Ben was going to use his mind to go into business," says Bobby Poss, his coach at Reynolds High just east of Asheville. "He was sitting in his office, had a really nice career ahead of him. After a couple of months, he looked out the window and said couldn't spend the rest of his life in an office. He called his dad and said he really wanted to coach. His dad was a lifelong coach. He understood and supported Ben."

"I missed the locker room, the competition, just hanging out with the guys," Johnson says. "That gets yanked away from you. It can be tough. I enjoyed my job, but still, I didn't want to wake up one day at age 40 and having spent my entire life in an office. When you're young, you just want a little bit more adventure and maybe travel around a little bit. That was probably what got the gears turning."

The gears started churning and the dominoes started falling—first as a graduate assistant at Boston College under Gary Tranquill, who had been his coach at Carolina in 2004 and '05; then to the Miami Dolphins from 2012-18 working with quarterbacks, tight ends and receivers; and then to Detroit in 2019 in multiple roles that led in 2022 to being named offensive coordinator.

And with QB Jared Goff's marked improvement with the Lions over his former post with the Los Angeles Rams and the productivity of the Lions' offense built around a physical running game and creative and multi-faceted play-action passing game, Johnson has gotten into the mix the last two off-seasons with potential head coaching opportunities, most notably in early 2024 with the Washington Commanders and Seattle Seahawks. His boss Dan Campbell says, "Ben's a rock star."

Talk about a career in overdrive.

In the thick of the January job-swapping season, Johnson huddled with his wife Jessica (his hometown sweetheart and, incidentally, a former cheerleader at N.C. State) and they decided to stand pat in Detroit.

"We just came to a really good decision of, 'Hey, you know, we're happy where we are. We love where we are. We love being in Detroit, love the people here,' and just decided then to go ahead and put the brakes on it right now," Johnson says. "Just wasn't the time for us."

(Photos courtesy of the Johnson family and Detroit Lions)

The die was cast around the kitchen table in the home of Don and Gail Johnson in the Fairview community outside of Asheville, where they had lived since 1994 when Johnson moved from Scotland County High to join Poss's coaching staff. They had three children, Kasey, Ben and Kyle.

Ben developed two particular interests in early elementary school. An arithmetic lesson spurred him to get a spiral-bound, ruled notebook and a crayon, and he started on page one writing numbers sequentially, line after line, page after page, until the book was filled.

"He said, 'I have a goal here,' it was really important to him," Don says. "He took a lot of pride in that numbers book. He could count all the way around the world."

That interest and skill in numbers would remain a constant. In middle school, Ben notched a perfect score on a Mathematical Association of America test. And in high school on a spring break cruise, he was the ship champion of Sudoku, a logic-based, number placement puzzle game.

Ben was also intrigued by the Xs-and-Os and lines and arrows his father drew in his playbook for the Rockets.

"Beyond the math, Ben was always very artistic," says his sister Kasey. "He's a lefty, and the brains of left-handed people tend to be unique. My dad drew plays, Ben drew plays. It's not a surprise he chose coaching as a career. His background in math and computer science was such a perfect match for being an offensive coordinator."

The Reynolds High team in the early 2000s was built around rock-ribbed defense (future Tar Heel linebacker Chase Rice was a stud on the 2002 championship team that went 14-1) and a powerful running game, so there wasn't much opportunity for a quarterback to pile up gaudy numbers. Wake Forest was on the cusp of offering Johnson a scholarship during the 2003-04 recruiting campaign but at the last moment gave it to another prospect. Johnson got some interest from Ivy League schools but decided to attend Carolina and walk-on the football team.

One of the appeals was the chemistry he struck with Gary Tranquill, the 64-year-old quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator under John Bunting from 2001-05 known in coaching circles as "Trank." Tranquill was renowned for his dry wit, curmudgeonly ways and depth of football knowledge dating back to his days as head coach at Navy in the 1980s and then working with both Bill Belichick and Nick Saban with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s.

"Trank's honest, he's transparent and he's not afraid to tell you like it is, and that was refreshing to me," Johnson says. "It's funny because it feels like looking at college ball now, it's the complete opposite. It's like the moment you hear some hard truth, these guys bolt to the transfer portal. But I honestly thought being around him made me better both on and off the field. It's really how I grew up—my dad was very blunt and honest with me and that's what I appreciated about Trank."

A second major influence was when John Shoop took that same job in 2007 under new head coach Butch Davis. By his senior year, Johnson had yet to take a snap at quarterback in a game but was still the guy who knew what the Tar Heels' tendencies were on second-and-five from the right hash in negative territory or what Virginia's defense was likely to do on third-and-nine. Shoop says it took a while after he arrived in early 2007 to learn that Johnson was actually a non-scholarship player, so solid were his athletic skills and football I.Q.

"T.J. was just a little bit better," Shoop says. "That's why T.J. had the job. But Ben was uncommonly bright. He had common sense and the interpersonal skills to match that high intelligence. He was the kind of person others gravitate to. He was my signal guy that year—relaying my calls into T.J. He was definitely wired to play the position."

"Coach Shoop was the first guy I looked at and said, 'I'd like to have the impact that this guy had on me and others," Johnson says. "He looked beyond me as just a walk-on. He was all about developing you as a football player but also as a person. For the first time I thought, 'Maybe there's a future in this.'"

Johnson had a couple of "Rudy-type moments" in his playing career, one of them when he was pulverized by a double team block from Madison Hedgecock and Jon Hamlett when covering a kick full speed.

"They knocked me on my rear," he says. "I can still feel that one 20 years later."

Johnson played first team on the punt unit his senior year and gulped in preparation for the Georgia Tech game when his assignment was to block a 6-foot-7, 260-pound defensive end named Michael Johnson (who would later play a decade for the Cincinnati Bengals).

"The mismatch of all time, but I said, screw it, what do I have to lose at this point?" Johnson says. "But low man wins in football, right? I was able to get my hands on his breast plate and I ended up pancaking him. The sideline went crazy. I still can't find a clip of that play, though. I tell that story to some guys here in the NFL and they don't believe me."

There are plenty of those around Tar Heel football from two decades ago and who've crossed Johnson's path since then who'll believe anything is possible.

"It's a cool lesson—first to the film room, last to leave," says teammate and housemate Connor Barth, a Tar Heel kicker from 2004-07. "Hard work wins. Brilliant guys finish first, whatever. We're out here watching him."

"Ben was way ahead of his time with technology and computers and generating useful information," says Clyde Christensen, the Miami offensive coordinator for two years overlapping Johnson's stint with the Dolphins (and now an analyst on Mack Brown's staff). "Most of us borrow or steal from someone else. He was literally writing his own programs. He's incredibly bright, incredibly hard working and is a great family guy committed to family and finding the right work-family balance. When he's ready to move up, I think he'll do it and be really good at it."

Bobby Poss retired from coaching in 2002 with five state titles and a 73 percent winning mark over three decades and since then has operated a motivational and teaching program he calls, "Be An Eleven"—as in, on a scale of one to 10 in competition, school work or any aspect of life, strive beyond the highest threshold.

"Ben's the poster boy," Poss says. "If I'm doing a clinic, I've got a photo of Ben Johnson. I point to him and say, 'On a scale of one to 10, be an eleven.'"

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace (Carolina '79) has been writing about Tar Heel football under the "Extra Points" banner since 1990 and reporting from the sidelines on radio broadcasts since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

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