Ben Johnson is quickly gaining acclaim around the NFL for his aggressively creative offense scheme. The Lions offensive coordinator is known for keeping defenses off guard with his play designs and timing in unleashing special plays.
Johnson draws inspiration from a number of places, most notably head coach Dan Campbell–who is quite involved the process. But Johnson recently got an interesting idea from an unusual place: an official working one of the Lions practices.
Game officials often work practices to help out the teams in learning what will get called, but also to stay sharp and get real-life training. They’re human, too, and one is apparently a budding offensive mastermind.
As Johnson explained enthusiastically before Saturday’s practice,
“We were – I think we were practicing against Jacksonville just a couple weeks ago and it’s the special teams period, and one of the officials walked up to me and he had – I still have the diagram in my office. It’s a piece of – he’s got 11 guys written up and he literally took the entire special teams period, it was over five minutes talking about how this play would work out, so. That’s probably been the coolest setting that I’ve been – I mean we’re right in the middle of practice and he went off on a tangent. It’s a good idea. It’s a little bit out of the box. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it happen before, but.”
Johnson admitted he would acknowledge the source of the play if he ever uses it in a game.
“Yeah, I’ll let you – I have to give credit where credit is due,” Johnson said without further hint of what the play might be.