Sean McDermott barely remembered the moment that injected rocket fuel into one of the Buffalo Bills’ most indispensable players.
“Taron got benched?”
McDermott searched through his internal database.
“I forget.”
That’s how much now star nickel corner Taron Johnson has erased the day the Bills benched him in 2020, merely a distant footnote in his career. A thing seemingly so little in the grand scheme. But to Johnson, it became the mountainous inflection point of his career. The catalyst that freed him from everything that had been holding him back.
“They already don’t want me. That’s what I’m thinking in my head,” Johnson recalled. “Am I just going to let this basically be the end of my career type thing? Or am I going to take it for what it is and just keep moving forward?”
Now, as one of their best players who could improve their Super Bowl chances, forward is exactly where Johnson went. But it wasn’t easy, with a tumultuous journey, just getting to that defining moment.
New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen pinpointed the day he saw Taron Johnson in person for the first time.
Schoen, in his first draft cycle as the Bills assistant GM, found himself in the heart of Utah on a mid-October day in 2017. He spent the afternoon in Logan, watching Josh Allen’s Wyoming Cowboys get a 28-23 win over Jordan Love’s Utah State Aggies.
Right after, and just before a red-eye flight home out of neighboring Salt Lake City that same night, Schoen made the one-hour beeline to Ogden for the Beehive Bowl between Weber State and Southern Utah. Schoen went there to scout Johnson, who had garnered high grades with Weber State from the Bills’ scouting staff.
“I can see it vividly. I was up in that press box and it was a small press box,” Schoen recalled. “I got there, the game had just kind of started. So I watched a little bit of the game on the track. And then I went upstairs. I had never been at Weber State before in my life.”
Johnson didn’t take long to stand out, confirming everything the team had seen on film.
“Just one play, he plant and drove. And I was like, holy s—, he was quick. And then he was physical on the tackle,” Schoen said. “I’m like, okay. I just saw it.”
Little did Schoen know at the time, he scouted two of the most foundational pieces in the Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane era in one day. And at two smaller schools in the state of Utah, no less.
McDermott first saw his eventual nickel corner while standing on the field at the 2018 Senior Bowl.
“He’s playing that corner out there and his shirt is like tucked up. He’s got the abs and like, he’s right in somebody’s face. I’m like, first of all, this guy could have been a great wrestler,” McDermott said with a laugh. “And then I was just watching him compete. He was a fierce competitor. A dog. And I mean, that’s how he is. He competes every day.”
The Bills wound up landing Johnson with their fourth-round pick in 2018. And unlike many rookies since McDermott arrived, Johnson was thrust into an immediate defensive role as their primary nickel.
But his professional debut is where the tumult began. Johnson suffered a torn labrum after just 17 defensive snaps. He only missed one game, but the injury lingered, with the corner going in and out of the lineup during games the rest of the season before the team held him out of the final four contests. Johnson’s torn labrum required surgery.
Injuries followed him again into 2019. The shoulder injury was behind him, but a hamstring injury struck this time. Once again, cruelly, occuring in Week 1. Johnson missed the next four games with that hamstring strain, just after he missed some preseason time with a groin injury.
Johnson decided enough was enough.
He dedicated himself to his workout regimen in the off months. He lifted weights more. He ran more. He went from a four-day workout routine in the offseason to a six-day workout. And this was all while being glued to his iPad, which he convinced the team to let him take home to do film study and self-scouting. That part begins in March.
He gives himself some time to decompress after the season.
Weber State defensive back Taron Johnson runs the 40-yard dash at the 2018 NFL Scouting Combine on Monday, March 5, 2018, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Gregory Payan)
Two weeks. That’s it. And then it’s back to the grind.
“In the offseason, that’s where you really can get better,” Johnson said. “And I don’t want to take time to not get better and just try to get in shape. I want to get in shape, and then get better. You know what I’m saying? Where most guys are just trying to get in shape.”
Johnson seemingly solved the Week 1 injury bug through his new offseason routine. However, a new Week 1 battle began in his third season.
His confidence.
Fully healthy, Johnson entered the 2020 campaign once again as the unquestioned starter at nickel. There was no in-house competition heading into the make-or-break year of his career.
But at one point, he teetered toward broken.
The Bills opened up against the Jets and watched as Jamison Crowder had several key one-on-one wins en route to a seven-catch, 115-yard performance. Johnson had been hesitating ever so slightly at the line of scrimmage, which put him immediately behind in the rep.
That bled into Week 3 against the Rams with Johnson tasked to guard Cooper Kupp, one of the best slot receivers in the NFL. The same problems persisted for Johnson. Kupp went for nine receptions, 107 yards and a touchdown.
“I think you saw a guy that was probably, I don’t know, maybe he was pressing,” Bills general manager Brandon Beane said of Johnson’s 2020 struggles.
Their upcoming opponents took notice, too. It reached a low point during their Week 5 loss to the Titans, a 42-16 blowout. McDermott, known to tinker with his starting lineups in the first two months of the season, saw his team searching for an answer on defense. The temporary solution ultimately landed on removing the talented yet struggling Johnson from the lineup.
With an in-house option in Cam Lewis, who played his way into consideration, and Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs coming to town in Week 6, they decided to give Lewis, their recent practice squad call-up, a chance in a big spot. And for the first time since Johnson arrived in Buffalo, he would not run out on the field with the first-team defense when healthy enough to play.
Despite natural temptation, Johnson never got down on himself.
“I remember Levi Wallace telling me like, ‘Man, don’t feel sorry for yourself,” Johnson said. “He’s like, make sure you’re helping Cam and stuff like that, and that’s what I did. And I tried to have the best attitude I possibly could.”
“You never saw his body language change. You never saw an attitude,” Beane recalled. “He was never up in my office or other people’s office. ‘What have I done?’ Or, ‘What is this?’ It was just everything that I saw from him and heard from his coaches and others is, ‘What do I got to do to earn your trust to be back out there?’ And he just continued to work.”
That mentality immediately served Johnson well.
A rain-filled game against the Chiefs began, and Johnson remembered the feeling of watching the defense from the sidelines for the first time. He called it “surreal.”
“I really thought my opportunity was gone in that moment,” Johnson said.
The moment didn’t linger.
The first defensive series ended in a Chiefs punt — eight plays total. Later in the first quarter, the Chiefs had the ball again. On just their second play of that series, Mahomes went through his progressions and dumped it down to Clyde Edwards-Helaire in the flat.
Lewis was protecting the right sideline and was ready to make the tackle, but Edwards-Helaire did a late cutback toward the middle of the field. Lewis lunged and got his left arm in front to slow the runner down. They got the stop. Johnson watched on from the sidelines at the 42-yard line.
But when Lewis popped up off the ground, he immediately began shaking his left hand and called to the sideline for a substitute. Johnson sprinted to the defensive huddle.
Ten snaps, the NFL equivalent of a snap of a finger, and just like that, Johnson was back on the field.
Lewis didn’t return to the game. And after Johnson’s brief sideline stint, he never let anyone take his job again.
“I was playing not to get beat instead of playing to win,” Johnson said. “What happened after I got benched is it took that fear away. It took the fear away of getting benched.”
Buffalo Bills cornerback Taron Johnson (7) breaks up a pass to New York Giants tight end Darren Waller (12) on the final play of an NFL football game in Orchard Park, N.Y., Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023. The Bills defeated the Giants 14-9. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)
Something was different about Johnson from that point forward. Even in the loss to the Chiefs, he looked unburdened as a coverage defender. His play improved dramatically.
“They already don’t want me. So I might as well do it,” Johnson recalled thinking. “Kind of like a ‘Fuck it’ type thing. I wasn’t afraid to lose anymore.”
He was a standout the next week against the Jets, then again two games later against the Cardinals, then the Chargers in Week 12, the Steelers in Week 14, the Broncos in Week 15, and the Dolphins in Week 17. During all the in-between, Johnson provided a baseline of production. Consistency had previously eluded him. The team knew they could rely on him.
And then, in the playoffs, Johnson’s career took off in a way no one would have predicted with how his 2020 season began. The very definition of “make” in that make-or-break year.
With the Bills up by only seven points against the Ravens in the AFC Divisional round, Johnson made his career-defining play.
The Ravens were driving, only nine yards shy of the end zone, with under one minute to play. The Bills faced a 3rd-and-9 with the game on the line.
You probably know how the rest of it goes.
“I look at my highlights before my games sometimes to get in that mode. And I look at that play and sometimes I’m just like wow. It’s amazing. Like it’s just the feeling of having that opportunity when it happened, how it happened,” Johnson said. “It was a special moment. And even like I was looking at it, no lie, before the Steelers [preseason] game. And I just remember looking at (Tre’Davious White) block for me. I don’t know why, but that be choking me up sometimes when I see that.”
His voice cracked, even though the play happened 1,312 days before he discussed it.
For Johnson, that singular play was a culmination of two-and-a-half years of varying struggles and the emergence of a secret superstar on the Bills roster in years to come.
Would that moment have happened had the team not benched him?
“Who knows? I know I wouldn’t have played at the level I was playing at if I didn’t get benched,” Johnson said. “It’s almost something I needed to happen to me, you know?”
Had Edwards-Helaire not cut back to force Lewis to lunge tackle, it very easily could have been an alternate timeline for the Bills. Perhaps Lewis held on to the job, and Johnson moved on to his next destination once his rookie deal expired after 2021, and the Bills never knew Johnson as one of their most critical players.
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Although they remain very close and on the same team, Johnson and Lewis have never discussed what happened in 2020. The benching and subsequent injury to Lewis that sent Johnson on his journey to becoming one of the best nickel defenders in the NFL hasn’t been broached.
But since then, Johnson has transformed the Bills defense into one of the most versatile in the league. Beginning in 2021, the team has run exclusively nickel defense as their base because of his evolution.
A job description requiring him — and his 5-foot-11, 192-pound frame — to moonlight as a linebacker and crackdown against the run to deal with offensive linemen and some big, punishing running backs.
“Oh man,” McDermott chortled when asked what it takes to play that position. “A little bit of craziness. A lot of courage, and I think, just relentless confidence in oneself. He embodies those ingredients.”
From quiet, humble and unassuming early in his career to now being looked up to in the locker room, McDermott applauded Johnson’s leadership this summer on a roster in need of it. It’s a tip of the cap for the 28-year-old Johnson, who still has plenty of time left in the NFL but wants that to be a part of his legacy — especially from where it began.
“I want to be remembered as a good teammate. Impact the guys in that locker room, I’d say that would be the number one thing,” Johnson said. “But man, I’m just a guy who every time you watch them play, you go, ‘You put everything on the field like that.’ That’ll be something I would like to be remembered by, is how hard I played the game.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.