At this point it feels like an annual edge of your seat anxiety attack, doesn’t it? For the third year in a row, everyone is wondering what Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson is going to do. Will he take a head coaching job or will he stay in Detroit?
My take for a while has been that I see him returning to Detroit for the 2025 season. I feel he’s looking for that spot that is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you can’t say no to and I don’t think any of these current openings are that. I’m looking at next season with the Steelers, Bengals or Bills jobs could come open.
Still, there are some that are close to the situation who believe Johnson is ready right now. ESPN’s NFL insider Dan Graziano had this to say on that end.
“I expect Johnson will take a head coach job this cycle. He has been squirrely about it the past couple of years, but people I talk to close to the situation believe he’s in a different frame of mind and expect him to embrace the opportunity if it’s offered, which I believe it will be.”
There are thoughts that Johnson could be most intrigued by the Jaguars’ job, but that he would want to bring in his own GM instead of working with Trent Baalke who the Jags surprisingly retained. There’s interest in the Patriots and Bears jobs as well.
While that is what Graziano is hearing, his colleague Jeremy Fowler is hearing the opposite.
“Some people I talked to in the league believe Johnson could return to Detroit. And it doesn’t seem like a leverage play. That’s where he has been the past two cycles, and that could be the case again if his ideal head coaching destination isn’t there.”
As I mentioned earlier in the story, that’s where I’m at too. I don’t think the ideal job is there right now. I think there’s a lot of potential with quarterbacks like Caleb Williams and Trevor Lawrence that could be intriguing, but I also think those players are attached to volatile situations with impatient owners or GMs who might not be around much longer.
If organizational alignment is as important to Johnson as we understand it is, then I think he’ll clearly see that he won’t get it just about anywhere this year. The Patriots remain the one job that could threaten all of this, but the benefit is that Johnson is not the favorite there at the moment. That seems to be Mike Vrabel.
Lions fans will be on edge for a few weeks, but I think when it’s all said and done, Johnson will be back in 2025. Aaron Glenn, on the other hand, is as good as gone in my book.