I don’t need to tell you how much Michigan needs an instant-impact, five-star cornerback. Doubly so if he’s in-state. Triply if he’s the son of a football alum. Quadropoly if he’s intent on being a JJ McCarthy-level architect of his own class. And if Dad’s a co-founder of Sound Mind Sound Body’s 7v7 program and chaperones all those trips with the Detroit-area’s top high school talent, well, it would have been a shame to lose that guy to Ohio State or USC.

In January, as Harbaugh’s assistants were being set adrift and his own contract was in doubt, Will Johnson, son of Moeller-era cornerback Deon Johnson, was close to committing to Ohio State in the afterglow of a good visit. That’s when Jim called to let Deon’s boy know where he stands:

“So, (Harbaugh) got on the phone with Will and let him know, 'I'm going to be at Michigan. This is where I want to be. I have a vision and some exciting moves that I'm going to be making here in the coming days and weeks. And part of the vision moving forward has you involved. You are a key piece of it.'

One Mo Linguist and a Ron Bellamy later, Will Johnson chose Michigan.

The Next Chapter ? pic.twitter.com/U2XX2LEIQc

— Wílł Jøhnšoñ (@Willj1228) February 28, 2021

Since cornerback is one of the least fakeable positions in sports, and Michigan just hired a pair of defensive coordinators from the two NFL programs that build from the secondary-on-down, Johnson will absolutely be a key piece of any future that doesn’t involve ending each year with a demoralizing drubbing. The only bad news is the future can’t get here soon enough.

GURU RATINGS

Rivals	ESPN	247	247 Comp
5*, 6.1, #13 Ovr, #4 CB, #1 MI	4*, 87, #29 Ovr #4 CB, #1 MI, #1 MW	4*, 95, #33 Ovr, #6 CB, #1 MI	5*, .9910, #11 Ovr, #5 CB, #1 MI
4.92*	4.82*	4.67*	4.91*

Bottom row is my conversion of the above to a 5-star scale. Links are to profiles.

Some of the sites have yet to declare most of their five-stars—ESPN tends to underrate players not from SEC country but they’ve never failed to give a fifth star to the #1 player in the Midwest. Only 24/7 has Johnson outside their normal 5-star range.

They’re also the site saying Johnson’s already 6-3/190. Rivals lists him at 6-2/182, and ESPN is at 6-1/180. Sound Mind Sound Body measured him at 6-2.5/185 in July. How much more he’s going to grow, and whether that will slow him down, appears to be the question.

[After the JUMP: effusive]

SCOUTING

24/7 is the outlier and most recently updated their ranking. We’ll start with Allen Trieu’s scouting report:

Great size and still growing. Has length, but is also filled in and looks like a prototypical outside cornerback prospect. Good athlete who excels on the basketball court and has shown top notch ball skills on the football field. Has the size and ball tracking ability to defend bigger outside receivers. Has good technique. Smooth in his backpedal and transition. Smart as far as zone coverage. Has yet to time at an event or in track, so verified speed is one question mark right now. It is possible he will outgrow cornerback if he keeps getting taller and bigger, but at present, projects as a blue-chip boundary cornerback who will be an impact college player and have a good chance to be a higher draft choice.

That scouting report hasn’t changed since Johnson debuted on their 2022 board as a 5-star, and #15 overall, last July. That was also when 24/7 changed his size to 6-3/190, following a standout performance at the thing that replaced Sound Mind, Sound Body’s usual Best of the Midwest camp. Sam Webb reports a 4.47 forty from that camp, and Trieu remarked that was the first time they had measurables, so it appears the time thing is out of date. Trieu:

“I think without having some testing numbers down before, people were wondering, 'well, what's he going to be like on a stopwatch?' So, to have some of those results is excellent for him. Especially at that size. And when you're a big corner you're always going to fight the thought that, 'well, is this guy a safety?' I think the more that he can show that he has elite recovery speed and change the direction, the more that he can prove that he is an elite shut down corner…. not a guy that needs to move to safety. So, that's the thing I take most from these results.”

The Max Ex team had a workout for 24/7 a year ago, but Trieu’s takeaway was brief, though among the Top 2022 performers:

Did not see him take many 1-1 reps, but he was big and smooth in the drills.

In October we got a quick evaluation from the ND guy I like, Kevin Sinclair:

His size is overwhelming and his athleticism isn’t missing any components. The reach on this young corner, alone, is a major problem for wide receivers.

They most recently saw him at a 7v7 Miami competition, when Johnson was…

limited by an ankle injury so he played safety and still looked good moving around and covering a lot of ground.

He still made a rangy pick. That was January 23, when Johnson was 24/7’s #3 cornerback. He was the #6 CB when they released their re-ranks a week later, and dropped from #11 overall to #33. Ohio State writer Bill Kurelic consistently reported that Johnson was at the top of their board.

Rivals is the highest on Johnson, his 5th star solidified at the SMSB camp in Detroit last summer:

Ranked as one of the first four-stars in the 2022 class, Johnson is knocking on that five-star door and pretty close to kicking it down. He looks every bit his listed size of 6-foot-2 and 182 pounds, but he is so fluid and such a gifted athlete for the cornerback position. Johnson also clocked a 4.46 40-yard dash on this day when there was some light testing being done.

Director of recruiting Mike Farrell looked for a comp, chose a 6-1/203 5-star who went in the first round, then corrected himself because that’s just the floor:

Johnson is a hard comparison because he’s big but not thick and he’s tall and rangy and angular. I am going with Eli Apple but Jalen Ramsey is also possible. That’s his ceiling.

Farrell and Gorney also used Will Johnson to argue 2022’s cornerback class is as good as 2013’s.

People kept trying to see Johnson this year, but he was hurt on the first play of the season against Giovanni El-Hadi’s Stevenson, which lingered into his tournament game against Rayshaun Benny’s Oak Park two weeks later (they crushed rival North in the interim).

Joseph Hastings of Buckeye Grove got the most in depth($), calling Johnson “one of the best all-around athletes I have studied thus far in the 2022 cycle.” They also went beyond the coverage measurables:

One of the things that impresses me the most about Johnson's game is that he is not a finesse tackler; he goes after opposing ball carriers and wideouts with the mindset of an inside linebacker. […] very physical as soon as the ball is hiked. The Michigan-based DB loves to jam receivers, which usually disrupts their entire route and eliminates them from the play.

But the coverage was there too:

[…] does an excellent job of turning his hips and understanding where the receiver will make his next break.

[…] has a quick first step and can take it to another gear in a moment's notice. I did not really see too many examples of his recovery speed or him chasing down ball carriers, but I imagine he can keep up his speed for long distances based on some of the go routes he ran as a receiver.

There were countless examples of Johnson's great anticipation as well, which you can attribute to multiple factors.

Eleven Warriors sent their recruiting guy to take a look last summer, right after Okudah got drafted and Kerry Coombs was hoping to make Johnson the next hyper-talented 1st rounder whose NFL team bitches about how uncoached they show up.

Johnson has the size and the length that Coombs loves in a cornerback. Add in Johnson’s competitiveness, how he gets out of his breaks, his 4.5 speed in the 40 and ball skills, and all of that makes him one of if not the top target for the Buckeyes in the 2022 cornerback class.

His athleticism on the basketball court as a standout shooting guard and his comfort with press-man coverage – which Grosse Pointe South runs 90 percent of the time – only adds to his repertoire.

Coombs also left with a critique of Johnson’s game:

…he believes Johnson's backpedaling and foot quickness could each use some improvement. […] In fact, one of the first questions Coombs asked the younger Johnson was why his feet look quicker on the basketball court than they do on the football field, and Coombs wanted to show Johnson how he could move his feet more quickly at the cornerback spot.

Will’s been elite so long that it’s hard to get anyone to say why anymore. His Grosse Pointe South coach also coached the pre-9th grade 7v7 team and was immediately like “Oh, giddyup!”

He didn’t get intimidated by really good varsity football players. He’s got great ball skills – not only for his age but maybe the best ball skills I’ve seen in my time at South. He’s long. He’s fast. He’s actually deceptively fast because he’s so long it kind of looks like he’s just coasting, but he’s moving. He’s getting down the field. And like I said, just his ball skills, his ability to compete with varsity athletes and have success

A couple of seasons in, that impression hasn’t changed.

“Will is an elite talent,” South coach Tim Brandon said. “Hands down, he’s the best skill position player I’ve ever coached. He has length. He has speed. He has the hips. He’s the complete package.”

Father Deon, who played cornerback for Moeller in the 1990s, helped Bill Blackwell found Sound Mind Sound Body’s Maximum Exposure 7v7 team. He says Will learned how to prepare from being around all of these future pros:

I think a lot of it is, before he even got on the field, he would go on trips with us and just being around the guys. I would let him go be around the guys in the room and he saw how they prepared themselves and how hard they work. Growing up and him being familiar with them, then when they came back, Jourdan [Lewis], Lavert [Hill], Ambry [Thomas], those guys come back and see how they still work, talking to them and having them say ‘it isn’t about how good people say you are, it is work and work and work as hard as the guy next to you. Being around it, that’s helped out a lot.

And SMSB founder Curtis Blackwell noticed they were growing something special:

He was kind of undersized initially. His dad was always worried like ‘man I hope my son grows’ and then all of a sudden, he hit a growth spurt and now he’s almost 6’3”. As he started to play little league with the Titans, we would see him make plays and see him getting more and more confidence. Then I saw him play basketball, and he is just scratching the surface as a 9th grader, he will be on a whole other level three years from now.

Johnson was looking at LSU last spring and said he’s modeling his game a lot on 6-1/195 All-American Derek Stingley Jr., a comp I find interesting because Stingley is all arms.

OFFERS

Everybody in the country wanted Will, as you might imagine. Everyone around SMSB knew Deon’s kid was coming up, and when he shot up as a freshman the offers flew in. Everybody had an in. Michigan State offered early and were selling their history of development. Kentucky DB coach Steve Clinkscale has been a thorn in Michigan for years. Ohio State brought back Kerry Coombs, who pilfered Damon Webb and Mike Weber out of Detroit in the not too distant past. Penn State’s (now Tennessee’s) Tim Banks played high school ball with Deon. Ole Miss offered the second Chris Partridge found the drawer where they keep them. Alabama dispatched Bobby Williams. Notre Dame, LSU, Texas A&M, USC, Oklahoma… you get it.

LSU was looking like a player at one point but didn’t make a top five that included Arizona State, Oklahoma, and the three finalists. Johnson visited Michigan with the other recruits for the Wisconsin game, at which time it felt like the Wolverines might land Johnson and even higher-rated (and larger) five-star Domani Jackson as a “package deal.”($) As Ohio State fell by the wayside, it was USC, their ace recruiter Donte Williams, and now-USC commit Jackson providing the final drama.

HIGH SCHOOL

Grosse Pointe—actually the Grosse Pointes: Park, City, Farms, Shores, and Woods—are Detroit’s first and fanciest suburbs. They’re a gorgeous, affluent, and extremely uppity strip along the shoreline of Lake St. Clair that was carved out in the late 19th century for the wealthy looking to live outside the city’s borders.

If we’re parsing between degrees of snootiness, Grosse Pointe South wins over North. The movie Grosse Pointe Blank, which is fictionally about a South reunion, could not be shot at the school because there are scenes where adults drink. I took my SAT at South, and nearly didn’t make it because my friends threw my Michigan bar hat out the window on 696, peeled over to let me retrieve it, peeled off to mess with me, and then got lost. It’s a beautiful building.

Their best known UM athlete is 2nd baseman Chris Getz. Football-wise, South never sent more than a couple of walk-ons to Michigan, but coach Tim Brandon turned the program around when he arrived in 2006, won his first title in 2010, and won so much over the next decade they moved up a division last year. Coach Bill Fleming, who had Shane Morris, Tru Wilson, and the Wangler boys at Warren at de la Salle, landed on Brandon’s staff last year.

As mentioned, the 7v7 circuit is as much home to Johnson as Grosse Pointe. He grew up around Terry Richardson, Devin Funchess, Jourdan Lewis, Ambry Thomas, and a lot of other future pros who traveled with Max Ex.

STATS

I don’t have stats from the six-game 2020 season but he had 21 tackles, 8 PBUs, 37 caches, 600 yards, 8 TDs, and a punt return TD as a sophomore, via MLive. That doesn’t even mention his rushing output as a wildcat QB and RB.

FAKE 40 TIME

Via the SMSB camp last July, Johnson clocked a 4.47 forty, and a 9.91 broad jump. Sam reports it was the second-fastest forty* and the longest jump of any prospect in attendance. Rivals reported a 4.46. I give the latter FAKES and the former two FAKES because they’re at camps but who knows maybe Dad was running the stopwatch or something, all 40 times are FAKE and a 6-3/190 guy who can move like that would be [Don Brown noises].

*(SMSB lists a 4.46 by both West Bloomfield 2022 ATH Dillon Tatum, one of Michigan’s top remaining targets, and Detroit Central’s Jus’tyz Tuggle)

VIDEO

Junior season:

Sophomore season:

SMSB workout video. Workout. Another workout. Single-game reels can be found on his Hudl page.

ETC

Plays basketball. You might have seen the dunk.

Grosse Pointe South 2022 Will Johnson has close to 20 D1 football offers but he plays some b-ball too and his team had a pretty good year.

Here he is showing his athleticism on this dunk against Hamtramck.@Willj1228 @dhscougars20 pic.twitter.com/c8BlWHFynl

— The D Zone Basketball (@TheDZoneBBall) March 18, 2020

Also this is a good opportunity for me to tell you to read this Rivals article from last summer about Deon Johnson and SMSB, wherein Will says he watches Wolverine Historian’s videos. Sam’s interview with Deon after the Johnsons were a part of that Wisconsin weekend trip is also worth a read.

PREDICTION BASED ON FLIMSY EVIDENCE

We haven’t had a guy like this. Ohio State hasn’t had a guy like this—even Jeff Okdudah was just under 6-1, not rounding up from 6-2. Alabama has guys like this, and they’re marvelous in their pattern-matching system because those arms jam you short, and take away anything quick and inside, and once you’re going downfield it’s Spiderman Pointing.gif on which guy’s supposed to be the receiver here. In a Don Brown a sound effect: Pshewooooooooooo!

I mean, he’s a 5-star cornerback who’ll be joining this roster, plus his classmates and whatever Michigan might scrounge up in the transfer portal in the next year. Johnson’s been around the game and gotten so much high-level coaching he’ll be as prepared as any IMG kid. Even if Linguist pulls in four more freshmen, Johnson is going to play.

That’s the uphot. The downshot is he could still be growing, and once you get to about 215 physics won’t let you change directions like you once did. Deon is one of the first generic Michigan players I remember. He was fast and athletic, but too big, top-heavy, and that led to bad momentum, a fact that Penn State’s Kerry Collins and Bobby Engram lethally exploited.

Here’s a viz I put together a couple of years ago on the size of Michigan’s starting cornerbacks through history:

You can take the link and mouseover to see the names I didn’t call out. There are lies in there aplenty but looking at the names on the upper-right edge of the main distribution—you know, Woodson, Marlin—you start to realize there’s an outer bound of plausible cornerback size where you get these insanely good players because they’re elite athletes who happen to be huge, and then outside of that you get a few freaks who are good enough athletes to make being huge work for them.

So Will could be the most insanely huge guy like that—Richard Sherman (6-3.5/205), Bobby Taylor (6-3/216), or Sean Smith (6-3/220). Jeremy Clark but fast. That kind of guy—the kind who can move like an average NFL cornerback with 4 extra inches—is an erasure who can survive most deep routes without the leverage provided by safety help.

If Johnson can stay in that 5-star range another year, the on-field fail rate on guys his size is near zero. I found eight CBs in the 24/7 database who were 6-2 or more and ranked within 20 spots of Johnson on the composite.* All eight started as freshmen, all but one with off-field issues were excellent college players, and all were in the NFL after three years, though a couple of them went undrafted. You have to get outside the top-50 to find a guy who didn’t work out. That’s MSU’s Julian Barnett, who was used as a receiver his freshman year, couldn’t crack the CB depth chart last year, and transferred to Memphis. The tall CBs ranked in the 50-100 range also turned into very good college players like Lamar Jackson (the Nebraska one), Yuri Wright, and Trayvon Mullen.

I know The Fear—JT Turner was the same size, balled out at the US Army game, and got the same buzzwords: hips, ball skills, cornerback fast, livin large, six-foot-two, and not an ounce of fat! (except ESPN was a huge skeptic). That also took place 11 years ago at safety in a secondary so dysfunctional some of its stories couldn’t be printed in the Bacon book about how dysfunctional it was.

In the scheme of things that’s a fluke nobody but a Michigan fan would think to bring up. Cornerback in general is the most translatable from recruiting rankings to on-field performance, and none of the signifiers of a potential bust—lack of speed, size, personality issues, or a lack of dedication to football—seem to apply. Johnson is as close as this world can give you to an elite, ready-to-use, three-year starter at boundary cornerback.

Giddyup!

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* [Patrick Peterson, Patrick Surtain II, Kevin Toliver, Tyson Campbell, Dre Kirkpatrick, Eli Ricks, Tavarus McFadden, and Antontio Cromartie. I may do a post.]

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UPSHOT FOR THE REST OF THE CLASS

Johnson is the sixth commit and the second cornerback, but he’s also much more than that. I don’t have to tell you what’s been missing from Michigan since the 2018 Ohio State game. You don’t have to tell Don Brown, nor Mike Macdonald, who was part of the Ravens defense that overstocked the cornerback room first, nor Mo Linguist, who was behind the Texas A&M offer to Johnson a few years ago.

Michigan also has the #1 guy on their board, and got him early enough in the process to convince other players on that level to give Michigan a real look. Will has been talking with 4.5* DB Jaeden Gould, and pure 5* NT Walter Nolen, and while it’s a longshot he’ll probably keep working on Jackson too. Like JJ McCarthy last year, Johnson wants to make sure he’s surrounded by talent. If the Harbaugh regime is to have a late renaissance, elite talent at positions like cornerback where talent can’t be faked is a good place to start.

Johnson also represents a renewed relationship between Michigan and the Detroit football factories and SMSB. Nearby Eastpointe’s 4* WR Tay’shawn Trent could be the next to join when he announces Wednesday, and West Bloomfield 4* ATH Dillon Tatum, whom Michigan sees as a do-everything safety, could also drop soon.