Kansas State QB Avery Johnson is healthy again. It shows when he runs the football
Many wondered why Avery Johnson stopped trying to make plays with his legs midway through this football season.
Johnson is one of the fastest quarterbacks in all of college football, and the Kansas State sophomore showed off his skills as a dual-threat player when he averaged 64.2 rushing yards in his first five games. But he surprisingly turned into a pocket passer over his next five games and only averaged 18.2 yards on the ground.
Then, out of nowhere, he got back to his running roots and totaled 72 yards and a touchdown as a rusher during a 41-15 victory against Cincinnati last weekend.
What changed?
K-State football coach Chris Klieman says the answer is simple.
“When you don’t have a healthy quarterback, you need to be smart and not run him so much,” Klieman said. “And there was a stretch there right after Colorado that he was not healthy. It’s known that he wasn’t healthy. Everybody wants to know, why aren’t you running him? Why aren’t you running him? Well, we can’t get him hurt. We can’t have him out. So we were probably a little bit smart with him to protect him and allowed him to get healthy.
“People saw when he’s healthy, we’re really good on offense.”
It turns out that Johnson’s hip injury during a road win against Colorado on Oct. 12 was more significant than Johnson or anyone else in the K-State football locker room admitted.
When he didn’t attempt a single run and threw for 298 yards against West Virginia, many assumed it was because he was injured. But Klieman said the Wildcats wanted to exploit the Mountaineers through the air. In other games, Klieman said the game plan was to get the ball to DJ Giddens and Dylan Edwards. But they were really trying to protect their quarterback.
Even when Johnson ran the ball, he was looking to get out of bounds rather than gain yards.
But with K-State on a losing streak and Johnson starting to feel better at practice, Klieman challenged Johnson to “cut it loose” as a runner last week.
Johnson was happy to oblige.
“That’s one of the strongest suits of my game,” Johnson said.
He proved that early on when he scampered for a gain of 34 yards on his first play from scrimmage.
“That just set the tone that we weren’t going to back down,” Johnson said. “We’re going to go right at you. Being able to get out and let guys open up holes for me and get explosive runs on the edge, it definitely settled me down.”
K-State looked like a different offense after it got its QB run game going.
The Wildcats rushed for 281 yards and dominated the Bearcats for four quarters.
Klieman and Johnson are hoping for more of the same in K-State’s regular-season finale on Saturday against Iowa State at Jack Trice Stadium.
“When he’s healthy, we’re really good. ... You can pull the football on designed runs or read runs,” Klieman said, “and you have to expand the field and not shrink it. When you expand it, boy, that opens up that run game with DJ quite a bit. Then, all of a sudden, it starts opening up some of the play-action shots. It opens more things up.”