Wanting to be ‘more than a jersey number’: How Justin Johnson found life after football

Justin Johnson’s brain, the thing he always cherished, the thing that was in jeopardy, went into overdrive.

It was 2019.

Johnson was a 19-year-old offensive lineman at Oregon who had just been told the concussion he suffered about a month earlier needed to be his last or he would risk permanent problems.

“My brain was all over the place,” the former Imhotep and Neumann Goretti standout said in a phone interview. “Befuddled. Shell-shocked because I had to think, ‘What now?’”

Anger, fear, and confusion brewed within his 6-foot-7, 350-pound frame as Johnson sat stone-faced while the team’s doctor advised him to quit football.

“Like a confused dog turning its head,” said Johnson, who was a late bloomer in high school. “What will life look like? What is a medical retirement? It was just a lot of pondering, shaking my head, and nodding because I didn’t have much to say except, ‘What’s next?’”

In a few weeks, Johnson, who credits family with much of his success, will receive a master’s degree with which he has already put to use by beginning to help college athletes maximize name, image, and likeness deals.

Now, he hopes his journey through disappointment, discovery, and rebirth will help other athletes.

“I had to understand that I’m more than a jersey number,” Johnson said. “I have a beautiful mind. I was raised by people who instilled in me that education is the passport to the future. I just had to come to terms that life is more than football.”

When he first arrived on campus at Oregon, Johnson, nicknamed “Big Fresh” because he was the biggest freshman in high school, learned quickly that size wasn’t everything in college.

Then-senior lineman Austin Faoliu, now with the Seattle Seahawks, provided this lesson.

“He went full speed, I went half speed and it was a wake-up to college football,” said Johnson, who injured his left shoulder in the exchange.

Johnson played through the injury but needed surgery, which led to a medical redshirt. It was his first taste of the obscurity that comes with injuries.

“If [you can’t play], they have plenty of kids who want to be at the University of Oregon that could fill in immediately,” Johnson said.

Perhaps that’s why he played with such reckless abandon when he returned the following season.

“The nature of our sport is to compete through the whistle,” he said. “That’s what I was doing. … After the play, I would just launch myself or do anything to get those pancake blocks. The competitive nature of fighting for a job really took over me because I had no way to stand out from anyone else except being this big, nasty guy on the field. So I was going to do anything and everything in my power to show my coaches. ... They had this thing: Put it on film if you want us to see it. And that’s what I was trying to do.”

Johnson isn’t sure how many concussions he’s had but says it was more than one. The last one occurred during an intrasquad scrimmage in 2019.

The play was a run-pass-option. Johnson blocked a lineman first and then found a linebacker. That second collision, he said, nearly made him vomit. He felt disoriented. Sunlight bothered him. Coaches screamed to get ready for the next play. He couldn’t.

That play would be his last.

Weeks of screenings, imaging, and testing followed — as did symptoms.

Headaches were frequent and relentless. Loud noises became a trigger.

Johnson said he was later offered the opportunity to travel with the team to a game at Auburn but declined, fearing stadium noise would flare his symptoms.

About a month had passed, he estimates, between his last concussion and the team doctor advising him to retire.

“I felt overwhelmed,” Johnson said. “It was a lot to view as a kid at 19 years old. You get recruited, you get loved up, and you go through the whole glitz and glamour of college recruiting. Then basically you get told this thing that 1% [of people get to chase] is no longer a thing you can chase.”

Side effects from a medication prescribed to lessen his symptoms only made things worse.

Johnson also felt isolated. He was separated from teammates, who practiced while he stayed mostly in dark, quiet rooms.

“He struggled a lot because he felt like he was letting his team down, letting his coaches down, and everybody who had pushed him, everybody who was on his side,” said Johnson’s grandmother, Florance Chandler. “But I told him, in the end, you have to stand alone. Make a decision that will make you proud of who you are.”

Continued support from family and former coaches eventually helped Johnson push forward.

Mike Wharton, Johnson’s cousin through marriage, took him in when Johnson reached high school.

Wharton flew to Oregon as Johnson pondered retirement.

“He didn’t come out and say that he was sad, but as a father, I kind of knew and I knew it was hard for him,” Wharton said.

Wharton had played football at West Catholic when Albie Crosby was an assistant in the early 2000s. Wharton had alerted his former coach about Johnson’s potential.

When they first met, Crosby asked Johnson if he liked football. Johnson replied, “No, I like computers.”

How would he like to go to college for free, asked Crosby, who coached Johnson at Imhotep and Neumann Goretti.

Remembering that original goal helped Johnson pick his path.

“I had to come to terms that if I want to wipe my own behind by the time I’m 60 years old, then I should take the doctor’s advice,” he said. “I’m a nerd. Football wasn’t my end all, be all, like a bunch of kids who wake up every day and their dream is to go to the NFL. I just wanted to get a free college education.”

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Still, retiring at 19 years old wasn’t easy. Johnson knew, according to NCAA rules, that Oregon had to honor his scholarship.

What he didn’t know is that he would lose access to facilities reserved for football players. He also learned that becoming what he says many athletes call a “non-athletic regular person” would mean not seeing his now-former teammates much, if at all.

The schedules of athletes, he said, are packed with study halls, tutoring and film sessions, meetings, practices, weightlifting, etc.

“It just felt disheartening because we were a really close-knit group of guys,” he said. “Then not even being able to have breakfast with them was just surreal.”

Instead of wallowing in disappointment, however, Johnson eventually leaned into life without sports.

Johnson’s move into the business world, he said, was motivated by Michael Strahan’s second act after football.

“Maybe I’m not as handsome or appealing as Mike,” Johnson said with a laugh, “so I just became more fixated on strategic communications and how to tell athletes’ stories.”

These days, he uses his experience as a student-athlete to build rapport.

“I always break the ice with, ‘I know you only got like two hours in a day to think about this stuff. I used to be an athlete, too,’” Johnson said.

He leads the strategy team at Oregon Accelerator, a student-led organization that elevates NIL opportunities by “providing creative, strategic, and actionable insights and resources.”

“He found what he wanted,” Johnson’s grandmother said. “It might not be what I thought he was going to be. It might not be what other people wanted him to be. But he found something that he could excel in, and that says to me that everything that I worked for, everything that I sacrificed, everything that he sacrificed, made him what he is. And he is a good human. He is a good human being. He’s kind. He’s thoughtful. And that’s what makes a man a man.”

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Recently, Johnson’s team helped Oregon softball player Paige Sinicki create social media content to fulfill part of her NIL deal.

Johnson has also helped Philly college athletes such as Temple’s Zymir Cobbs and Penn State’s Tyrece Mills with NIL education and execution. He also hopes to create workshops through Focused Athletics, the Philly-based nonprofit that supported him in high school.

“Coming from Philadelphia comes with trials and tribulations,” Johnson said. “It’s all about how you overcome adversity and persevere through it.”

“That’s all I’ve been trying to do,” he said, “beat the narrative and become more than just an athlete.”

Recently, Johnson accompanied his Oregon Accelerator group to an Oregon football practice, where he saw former teammates. They asked if he missed football.

“I just looked at them, sweat dripping down their faces, gasping for air, and I said ‘Nah, I’m good,’” Johnson said laughing. “I said, ‘I miss y’all.’ But I don’t miss Coach yelling at me to get my butt moving.”