As he sits back in a comfortable chair in a comfortable lounge, BYU cornerback Evan Johnson is talking about football and about a comfortable life. His football, his life. In his case, the two are inexorably mixed. You watch him in a game, blanketing opposing receivers and intercepting passes to save wins and occasionally — rarely — getting burned on a pass play; that’s how he is when he eats lunch or reads a book or hangs with friends.

Cool. Calm. Chill.

“I don’t get mad,” he says. “I don’t get angry. I’m just steady. That’s useful for a cornerback. The way I carry myself on the field is the way I carry myself off the field. If I give up a catch, I’m not sitting and thinking about it. If something happens, I don’t dwell on it. I’m not a ‘dweller.’ I’m moving on. I keep moving. That’s how I live my life, day to day.”

He adds: “I’m not looking at the past or to the future, I’m not setting any goals. There’s just today.”

Making the most of it.

Johnson, famously known as “Schmev” — a nickname emanating out of a rap battle with his cousins when he was a kid — by his teammates, friends, fans and now even his mother, Lynn, is an unusual football player. Not simply because he’s one of the Cougars’ finest talents, not because defensive coordinator Kelly Poppinga says he may be “one of the country’s best cornerbacks,” but rather because his demeanor is flat, not hum-drumming all the way to boring, but … how’s the song say it? … easy, easy like Sunday morning.

Kick back with him for just a bit and everything seems like it’s going to be all right.

He knows heading into his senior season at BYU that the NFL is waiting out there somewhere for him, just as it once did for his father, Ron, who played for Buddy Ryan’s Eagles. He doesn’t take that for granted. He doesn’t take it anywhere. He’s just attacking his personal improvement in the here and now. Working, not worrying.

“I’m happy doing what I’m doing,” he says. “I’m blessed. I’m grateful. I tell my mom that all the time. I play football for a living. That’s it. I love it. And I just want to be happy.”

Johnson sounds a little like John Lennon. When young John was asked in school — so it is said, anyway — what he wanted to be when he grew up, he responded with one word: “Happy.” When he was told he didn’t understand the question, Lennon supposedly told the teacher that she didn’t understand life.

When asked, Evan Johnson had no clue who John Lennon was, but he approaches football the way the founding Beatle approached music — with a passion.

“Everything in my life is football right now,” he says. “I’m locked in. I feel like this is the time when I truly can just love the game. I want to be around the game. I have no desire to take time off. I don’t want to go on vacation. I just want to play football … do drills, lift, train, get better.”

Johnson has gotten better. Much better.

Last season, when the Cougars went 12-2, the defensive back intercepted five balls, tied for tops in the Big 12, had eight pass breakups, made 47 tackles (38 solo), two tackles for loss and one sack. And, perhaps the biggest achievement of all for a corner, he built such a reputation among opposing offensive coaches and quarterbacks that, at times, teams would not even attempt to throw passes in his direction.

Remarkable, really, since Johnson came to BYU from Monterey, California, mostly because the Cougars were the only school that offered him a scholarship. San Jose State, Sacramento State and Fresno State sniffed around his senior year of high school, but … ultimately, nothing came.

“I thought I was going to have to go to junior college,” he says.

Johnson always had speed, playing receiver, but he lacked the skill refinement, at least seen as necessary by D1 recruiters, to continue on as a receiver or as a defensive back at a higher level. He disagreed, figuring he could overcome whatever he lacked. And he says, “I always thought I was the fastest guy in the world.” He still does.

As a prepster, he thrived in every sport he played, including basketball, baseball and track, running a 10.8 in the 100 meters. (He says he’s faster now.) Was he good at all of them?

“Oh, yeah,” he confirms with a laugh. “I think I could’ve played college basketball.”

But football was his calling, buried a couple of layers deep.

When he took an official visit to BYU in 2022 and coaches offered him a full ride, he hesitated only briefly before committing. “I loved it here and I felt loved,” he says. And for a player seemingly with such confidence, he was desperate.

He knew little about BYU beforehand, learning as he went. Secondary coach Jernaro Gilford told him “this place is different,” but it could have been Venus or Mars and Johnson wouldn’t have cared: “I just wanted to play football.”

He’s a religious person, a churchgoing Christian who says he enjoys the environment in Provo, and that the school’s Honor Code was never a problem for him. He pronounces, rather defiantly: “If you want to be successful and live a good life, you should follow the Honor Code. I had no interest in those other things.” These days, he says he’s “completely comfortable” at BYU.

On the reg, Johnson makes it a habit to “look up at the mountains and pray to God.” And God apparently is answering back.

BYU coaches first switched him from offense to defense, and over time his growth in the secondary has been exponential. During his redshirt sophomore year and leading up to his junior season, Johnson fully grasped then-DC Jay Hill’s schemes, and under the tutelage of Rob Daniel, a former graduate assistant for the Cougars and now a coach alongside other former BYU players at a football academy in Provo, he transformed into one of the Big 12’s most accomplished cornerbacks.

“I improved my technique and started trusting myself, gaining confidence,” he says. “If you look at the film, you can see it.”

Everyone saw it.

“Last year, I put everything into football,” he says. “I didn’t go home all summer. I missed birthdays, holidays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day. I just trained with Rob and I saw the biggest jump, working every day. I was then able to go make plays.”

Plays like the one he made against Georgia Tech in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, picking off a pass in the end zone that preserved BYU’s victory. It was emblematic of his entire season, his progression and a foreshadowing of what’s ahead, during both his senior year and what comes thereafter.

A foreshadowing that everyone but the player himself sees.

“Some people,” he says, “get caught up in that … ‘Am I gonna be this? Am I gonna do that?’ … but I’m not getting into that. My big thing is staying grounded. I’m just thinking about what I can do right now to improve, just putting the work in. When you put in the work, you know you’re better than anyone else.”

That last part reads cocky, beyond self-assured, when you see it in print, but when Johnson speaks it, it sounds universal, matter-of-fact, like 2 plus 2 equals 4. Duh.

Asked how he handles a bad day on the field or off it, Johnson answers: “The same way I handle a good day.”

The business management major, who’s scheduled to graduate in another semester, claims he “loves” school and schoolwork, that he’s made a lot of useful contacts at BYU who will help him in his … uh-oh, the forbidden word, future … but football is his thing now.

Everything is football. Football is life.

He says his father never pressured him into following the pro path he blazed: “He just wants me to be happy in life, whether that’s playing football or doing something else. And that’s what I want, to be happy.”

A certain Beatle would concur.