Long before he became one of the people most responsible for the Patriots’ post-Tom Brady revival, Jakob Johnson was living in southwest Germany, growing up, as he says, “in the wild” among the ponies, sheep, chicken and geese, living alongside a sister who, at age 7, could deadlift car tires affixed to either end of an iron rod in their yard. His last job before he started listing “Professional NFL Football Player” on his tax return was a member of the wait staff at a tie-dyed pizzeria called “Mellow Mushroom” and his foundational knowledge of football came from YouTube highlights and Wikipedia articles.
Johnson discovered the game as a restless child, rumbling through the fields of his red-roofed village after seeing highlights of Super Bowl XLII, or, as he refers to it, “the one with the helmet catch.” He didn’t know the rules until 2009, when a friend of his secured a copy of Madden with Brett Favre on the cover.
Teachers would send him home with a note for his mom: find better ways to tire him out; his active nature was bleeding into school time. Soccer was not physical enough. Swimming and ice hockey were too boring. But Johnson felt at home with the youth program of the local club team, Stuttgart Scorpions, wearing a Riddell helmet from the early 1990s left behind from the nascent days of NFL Europe.
At the time, Johnson says, the dream of becoming a football player was completely obscure. Now, he returns to Germany and sees kids playing in the same fields wearing Nike Vapor gear and understanding the nuances of defensive coverage that didn’t simply require you to follow a man out of the offensive backfield. His successes (and missteps, like a blown assignment resulting in a blocked punt against the Colts last week) are thoroughly dissected on German Football Twitter.
“[Back then,] it would be like telling someone you were going to become a professional skateboarder or something,” Johnson says.
So his journey to revivalist fullback in a retrofitted Patriots offense, minor international celebrity and centerpiece of the NFL’s International Player Pathway Program, which aims to globalize and diversify the league’s almost exclusively U.S. makeup, came as a bit of a surprise to everyone. Now in his third year, Johnson typically plays on about a third of the Patriots’ offensive snaps. He played almost half in a nearly pass-less, windswept victory over the Bills 16 days ago, in which Johnson made a critical block to free running back Damien Harris for a 64-yard touchdown. He is the fulcrum of their “21” personnel package (two running backs, one tight end and two wide receivers), which they use more than almost any other team in football. He is Pro Football Focus’ second-highest-graded fullback (behind Ravens stalwart Patrick Ricard). Last week, he received a ball from owner Robert Kraft at a press conference, held on his 27th birthday, commemorating his 1,000th snap in the NFL, a benchmark hit by only two other International Pathway players in the program’s history.
Last season, Bill Belichick said that Johnson was among the top five players he’d ever coached in terms of year-to-year growth. Belichick has told friends that he considers Johnson—easily identified by the brightly colored dreadlocks draped over the back of his neck collar—a “tone setter.” Johnson, in turn, has adopted some of his coach’s personality, artfully dodging a question about any difference between the playbook of the Stuttgart Scorpions (which, he says, names plays after random European countries), the last team he played for before coming to the NFL, and the one used by the Patriots.
“I knew what the media wrote about him, what people say,” Johnson says. “Super smart, super intelligent. People always just think he’s mean and mysterious. But [through him] I realized that there is so much more to the game than I was aware of.”
But before any of that, he was alone in his room in Stuttgart, copying and pasting the email addresses of every FBS and FCS position coach in the U.S. into an Excel spreadsheet, hoping someone else might take this vision he’d developed for his life as seriously as he did. At 18, he was recruited by an SEC school only to wash out with a handful of games under his belt. Three years after leaving the University of Tennessee and the country he was rediscovered, given a crash course in the sport’s highest level during a truncated season and, eventually, became an integral part of both the Patriots offense and a league-wide marketing strategy to tap into foreign markets à la the NBA.
It’s too much for Johnson sometimes, who, after receiving the ball from Kraft last week returned to his apartment and wondered: “Man, what if I just wake up tomorrow and I’m back in Germany?”
In the early days of the International Player Pathway Program, started in 2017, Damani Leech, the COO of NFL International, remembered a discussion focusing on the potential for a global scouting arms race across sports. Around that time, the Tampa Bay Rays’ construction of a baseball facility north of São Paulo, Brazil, served as a warning shot across the sporting world, opening eyes to the idea of an organization plopping itself in the middle of a hotbed filled with elite, untapped athletes and giving themselves exclusive permission to train them from the ground up.
Rich McKay, the CEO of the Falcons, told Leech he didn’t want the NFL to fall into a scenario in which the international market became the Wild West, with teams outbidding one another for raw, international talent. Not at that stage of development. It was obvious that the league had been flirting with foreign growth for various reasons, specifically as a way to ensure that the best athletes in the world land with the NFL. The NBA has had All-Stars from France, Germany, China, Nigeria, Greece, Spain, Slovenia and Argentina, and as a result enjoyed an injection of fans from across the world into its league.
The NFL’s goal was to get a similar influx of talent and, with that, the accompanying tailwind of business expansion tied to fanatics in foreign markets obsessing over the product. Its route was a centralized process in which foreign-born players would be identified en masse by a shared service, trained together and allocated throughout the NFL (each year a division is chosen at random to receive one of the small handful of IPPP candidates).
“Step 1 for us is increasing the number of foreign-born players in the NFL,” Leech said last week over Zoom. “Then we want them to achieve that individual success. Rookie of the Year, MVP, Defensive Player of the Year. That’s the next step from us in the evolution of the program.”
Over the past few seasons, the NFL has started to accumulate hits. Jordan Mailata, a starting offensive tackle for the Eagles, signed a four-year contract extension with the team earlier this season, making him one of the 16 highest-paid tackles in the NFL at $16 million per year. The former Australian rugby player is the first IPPP player ever selected in the NFL draft, selected despite never having played a single snap in an organized football game. Efe Obada, now a defensive end for the Bills after a previous life with the London Warriors, was the first IPPP player to log 1,000 snaps in his professional career.