Texas football wideout Isaiah Bond and Michigan corner Will Johnson became well acquainted on the grass approaching the Rose Bowl's north end zone on New Year's Day. There, Alabama ran six overtime plays in failing to extend last season's College Football Playoff semifinal.
Bond, then playing for the Crimson Tide , lined up across from Johnson for four of them.
After an offseason move to play for coach Steve Sarkisian's Longhorns (1-0), Bond is set to reunite with Johnson when Texas meets Michigan (1-0) on Saturday (11 a.m., FOX) in one of the season's premier nonconference games.
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Johnson, projected by many to be the first defensive back taken in next year's NFL Draft, won both on the scoreboard and in the box score. Alabama passed for 116 total yards in that game, with Bond's 47 receiving yards marking a team high.
If Texas — a 7.5-point road favorite on Saturday — comes back to Austin with its first loss of the season, Johnson and the Michigan secondary will almost certainly have proven similarly effective. That is one part of the field where the Wolverines have some continuity. Safety Makari Paige returned from last season's national championship team alongside Johnson, giving Michigan a pair of starters back.
The system Johnson is used in has changed, though. Longtime NFL assistant Wink Martindale replaced Jesse Minter as Michigan's defensive coordinator after Minter followed head coach Jim Harbaugh to the NFL. Sarkisian is expecting a defense loaded with creative pressure packages, he said Wednesday.
Last year, the Wolverines seemed willing to take different approaches with Johnson:
- Against Ohio State — a team with an undisputed top wide receiver in Marvin Harrison Jr. — the game film showed Johnson shadowing Harrison on just about every snap.
- In Michigan's game against Alabama — which rostered two wideouts who could claim to be the biggest threat in Bond and Jermaine Burton — Johnson's assignment didn't look to be as strict.
Texas' wide receiver room, with threats like Matthew Golden and DeAndre Moore Jr., seems to more closely approximate Alabama's situation.
"They have a lot of good receivers,” Johnson told reporters this week . “We played against Bond (in the Rose Bowl) last year and I was on the same 7-on-7 team with Golden in high school. They are very explosive with a lot of experience. When the ball is thrown my way, I have to make a play. I’m always expecting to get targeted so I’m trying to stay ready at all times.”
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Last season, opposing quarterbacks targeted the 6-foot-2, 202-pound Johnson 37 times. Just 17 of those resulted in completions.
In the 12 games he played, Johnson allowed roughly 1.4 catches per contest. To put that dominance to scale, Jalen Ramsey, voted by his peers as the NFL's top corner this offseason , allowed 23 receptions in 11 games last year.
At the end of the 2023 campaign, Johnson faced a trio of top-80 draft picks: Harrison, Burton and Washington's Rome Odunze. The latter two were held comfortably under their yardage averages for the season, but Harrison maintained his standards, tagging Michigan for 118 yards and a touchdown.
Against Johnson and the Wolverines, it will also be critical for Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers to continue to make smart decisions with the ball as he did last season. In 2022, 3.6% of Ewers' snaps were graded by Pro Football Focus as "turnover-worthy plays." That percentage shrunk to just 1.7% in 2023.
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With an elite pass rush to pressure quarterbacks into difficult choices, Johnson came down with four interceptions last year. In the Wolverines' 2024 opener against Fresno State, he jumped in front of a screen pass and took it back 86 yards for a game-sealing pick-six.
Saturday is Texas' first true test. And Johnson is the proctor.
“There’s a lot of football left to be played, but what I think Saturday will do for us is serve as a bit of a barometer of where we’re at as a football team this fall," Sarkisian said. "We’re going to get challenged in all three phases."
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This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Texas football must avoid this Michigan defensive star if it wants to leave Big House 2-0
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