Hunter Johnson no stranger to learning a new offense

EVANSTON-Hunter Johnson has quite a few built-in advantages in the competition for Northwestern's starting quarterback job.

The Clemson transfer has good size at 6-foot-2 and 216 pounds. He's an exceptional athlete who was fast enough to run the 100- and 200-meter sprints at Brownsburg (Ind.). And, most importantly, he has a rocket right arm that can really spin it.

"He was born to throw a football," is how Rivals recruiting expert Josh Helmholdt put it.

The one area where the redshirt sophomore is lacking, however, is knowledge of the offense. He hasn't had nearly as much experience as most of the other quarterbacks on the Wildcat roster.

TJ Green is in his fifth year, Aidan Smith his fourth, Andrew Marty his third. Johnson and Jason Whittaker are in their second years in Evanston, but Johnson spent last season running the scout team offense in practice, meaning he got far more reps in Northwestern's opponents' schemes than he did his own.

But if Johnson is behind the eight-ball in the playbook department, at least he has had plenty of practice learning offenses. Believe it or not, he has learned six different systems over the last seven years of his career, dating back to high school.

So he's a quick learner and he's catching up. Fast.

"I’m starting to feel a lot more confident," said Johnson at Northwestern's media day on Wednesday. "It comes with reps. For me, I’ve always known I’m a big rep guy. So I’ve always tried my best to rep it as much as I can (mentally) in the film room. For me, on the field, that’s where I can learn from those mistakes and get into good plays and things like that."

Green, a fifth-year senior who knows the offense as well as he does a campus map, has been impressed with how rapidly Johnson has gotten up to speed. He knows that Johnson is far ahead of where he was in his second year at NU.

"Hunter has only been here for a year, going on his second year, so he hasn’t gotten the exposure that I’ve had to the playbook being a fifth-year," said Green, a former walkon who just earned a scholarship at the end of last season. "So his ability to pick up on the playbook has been impressive. I know that my sophomore year, I was still swimming. It’s tough, but he’s really done a good job picking up on it.

“Also he has the great intangibles. He’s tall, he’s got a great arm. He can make any throw on the field. He’s a solid quarterback."

Johnson's history with offenses is more like a journeyman NFL backup's than it is that of the No. 2 signal caller in the country in the 2017 class.

Johnson transferred into Brownsburg as a freshman in 2013 and ran the Wing-T offense the school had been running "for a long time," he said. Perhaps realizing that they had an elite quarterback on their hands, the coaching staff switched to a pistol attack for Johnson's sophomore year and his passing total jumped by nearly 1,000 yards, going from 445 to 1,434, as his touchdowns rose from 3 to 10.

Then, when Johnson was a junior, the Bulldogs went to a full-blown spread to better utilize his prodigious talent. The numbers leaped again by 1,000 yards, to 2,545 passing yards, and he tripled his touchdown total to 31, against 12 interceptions.

Yet despite those swelling statistics, Brownsburg hadn’t had a winning season in Johnson's first three years behind center, posting a dismal 10-21 overall record. So the school made a coaching change, bringing in John Hart, and, for Johnson, another new system to learn.

While Johnson's numbers went down slightly as a senior, to 2,233 yards, with 25 touchdowns and 12 interceptions, the Bulldogs had a breakout season, going 8-2 and making the state playoffs as Johnson won the Indiana Mr. Football Award.

Johnson's career numbers are not as eye-popping as those of some other elite quarterback recruits in recent years, and he completed just over 50% of his passes in his career. But the fact that he ran four offenses in four years makes his stats all the more impressive.

Ranked as a five-star and the No. 18 prospect in the entire country in the 2017 class by Rivals, Johnson enrolled early at Clemson and had to learn the Tigers' spread system. He spent one year at the school, backing up starter Kelly Bryant on a playoff team, going 21-for-27 passing (77.8%) for 234 yards, with two touchdowns and one interception in 76 snaps over seven games.

The next January, a kid named Trevor Lawrence showed up at Clemson, and the rest his history. Sensing that Lawrence -- yet another five-star QB and the No. 1 recruit in the country for 2018 -- was a generational talent and knowing that he had already been passed on the depth chart by spring, Johnson made the decision to transfer to Northwestern, where his older brother, Cole, was a walkon from 2013-16.

So the Wildcats' version of the spread -- not all that different than Clemson's -- is Johnson's sixth system to learn. This will also be the first time he will have a second full year in the same offense since he started high school.

Johnson says that reps are the key to success in learning an offense, but he got hardly any last year. Sidelined by NCAA transfer rules, Johnson spent last season running the opponents' offense as the scout team quarterback.

"I was still able to go to meet for half of our (quarterback) meetings and then I’d leave halfway through to go to scout meetings," he explains. "So I was running all kinds of different systems last year: Iowa, Minnesota, all the Big Ten teams we were playing. Just trying to give (the defense) a look."

In a way, then, learning just one system is a piece of cake compared to learning a different one every week.

Johnson is a redshirt sophomore with three years of eligibility remaining, yet he is a junior academically so he is still working on his bachelor's degree. In mastering offenses, however, he has likely done enough field study to qualify for a Ph.D.

So has Johnson identified any shortcuts in learning a new offense? Are there any secrets to making a system second-nature?

Not really, he says.

"Reps and film study," he says. "You got to study it and study it and study it again."