Earlier this month, former Jacksonville Jaguars running back and current NFL Network analyst Maurice Jones-Drew appeared on Steve Smith’s ‘NFL Draft Breakdowns” show and recounted a story in the lead-up to the 2026 NFL Draft where he received a call from Kansas City Chiefs Offensive Coordinator Eric Bieniemy.
While Jones-Drew said in the interview that he often receives phone calls from teams inquiring about his thoughts on a prospect, his relationship with Bieniemy goes back a little bit further
than that.
Bieniemy was Jones-Drew’s running backs coach in college from 2003 to 2005 at UCLA. In three seasons under Bieniemy’s tutelage, Jones-Drew compiled 3322 yards from scrimmage and 33 touchdowns, averaging 5.2 yards per rushing attempt, which led to Jones-Drew being selected in the second round of the 2006 NFL Draft.
In the video below, Jones-Drew recounts the phone conversation he had with his former coach—
“…Bieniemy calls me, my guy and he’s like, “Hey, bro. I see these running back list. What’s going on?” And he’s like, “Who do you like?” I was like, “Bro, I love Nebraska. I love Nebraska.” I said, “Emmett Johnson from Nebraska.””
In the video, Jones-Drew explains why he is such a big fan of Johnson’s game, highlighting his contact balance and his ability in the receiving game as well.
Johnson led all Power Five football players in yards from scrimmage last season, with 1821 total yards; 297 of those were receiving yards. Johnson also had 1451 yards rushing, 15 total touchdowns, and averaged 6.1 yards per touch from scrimmage.
In the video, Jones-Drew said that the Chiefs weren’t the only team to whom he talked up Johnson.
“…I talked to a bunch of coaches and I talked to Bieniemy, right? And I’m like, Dude, I don’t know what y’all got going on, but I’m like, look, this kid here is legit. I told the Niners about him. I told uh a bunch of teams about him like, yo, this is a guy that I think is is really good. I told the Rams about him. I like this guy a lot.”
Unlike the other teams, though, Kansas City actually listened to Jones-Drew’s advice.
Jones-Drew also revealed that Bieniemy reached out to him on draft day, right before they traded up from pick 169 to 161 to select Johnson.
“Bieniemy texts me in the fifth round, “Hey, got your guy.””
And while Jones-Drew may or may not have given Bieniemy the confirmation he needed to believe in the team’s 161st-overall selection, Smith’s co-host on the show, veteran NFL reporter James Palmer, said that he spoke with Chiefs general manager Brett Veach as early as December of last year, and Johnson was already on their radar at that time.
…Around December was when Veach was picking specific position groups for the scouts to start looking at. You know, sometimes it’s DBs, sometimes it’s, hey, let’s take an extra look at this group. Running back was obviously one that he said, let’s take an extra extra look at this group. And there was a group of them that started going this Emmett Johnson kid like, and that was in December. They started feeling a little bit um in terms of where it was at. And then they didn’t think he’d fall to where he was, so they trade up and get him….
This was confirmed by Chiefs Vice President of Player Personnel, Ryne Nutt, after the Chiefs selected Johnson:
“I don’t know why he fell,” said Nutt, in a press conference on the Monday following draft weekend, “We were shocked he fell, and that’s why we took him in the fifth round, and that’s why Brett traded up to get him. Because of the conviction we had in the talent, and we because we knew that was probably lower than he should’ve gone, but we’re happy to have the kid for sure.”
With both Johnson and the high-profile acquisition of Kenneth Walker representing the team’s running back position moving forward, Kansas City seems to have recommitted this offseason to the running game in an effort to take back control of the line of scrimmage.
And if Johnson ends up being as good as Jones-Drew and the Chiefs think he can be, then Kansas City might have the best one-two punch of running backs we’ve seen since 2010, when running backs Jamaal Charles and Thomas Jones combined for 2953 yards from scrimmage between the two of them.
