“It’s been a long journey and I’m just trying to make sure I seize every moment of it.”
A lot can change in a few years. Just ask D’Ernest Johnson.
Back in 2018, he was completely out of football, working on a private fishing boat in Key West, Florida.
Just a few years later, he was making his first NFL start for the Cleveland Browns, where he outperformed all expectations.
D’Ernest was raised in Immokalee, Florida – a town where nearly 25% live below the poverty line.
After losing a daughter to domestic violence, his mother sent D’Ernest to live with his grandma and aunt.
“I grew up in a project, a three-bedroom apartment,” he said.
It was a strict household. D’Ernest and his siblings did things the right way, staying out of trouble, away from parties and negative influences.
“I always pushed them to do and go farther than we had,” his aunt, Undreas, said.
Johnson found a way to do that on the football field.
Immokalee High School produced a list of NFL players, including Edgerrin James, Albert Bentley, and J. C. Jackson.
D’Ernest wanted to be next.
“No lie, they used to call me ‘Little Barry Sanders’ because I was shakin’ and bakin’ everyone.”
In his junior year, he ran for 1,111 yards and scored 18 total touchdowns. That led to an offer to continue his career at the University of South Florida.
“Making it out of the projects and going to college, that’s big time,” he said. “Just having people before me…I [saw] I could really make a way out of this, make a way out of here.”
But USF marked a step up in competition.
For his first three seasons, D’Ernest was behind fellow running back Marlon Mack on the depth chart. Then, as a senior, he split carries with a fifth-year player, Darius Tice.
While he contributed as a running back, he only received recognition for his work on special teams – earning second-team American Athletic Conference honors as a return specialist in 2016.
Across four college seasons, Johnson’s stats as a running back didn’t leap off the page:
- 1,796 total rushing yards
- 909 receiving yards
- 28 total touchdowns
He put up bigger numbers in just a season and a half of high school ball.
And while he finished as USF’s all-time leader in all-purpose yards, his hopes of playing pro football looked bleak.
Ahead of the 2018 NFL Draft, analyst Lance Zierlein wrote: “Johnson simply doesn’t have the size, athleticism, speed or production that stands out…making a roster will be a challenge.”
Needless to say, he went undrafted in 2018. He said that draft day was “one of the saddest days” of his life.
“I left my family, I left everybody, and drove off to the lake…I just sat there and I cried…because that was my dream…that hurt me a lot.”
The following Monday, the New Orleans Saints invited him to their rookie 3-day minicamp. But they didn’t sign him.
So he went back home and waited for the phone to ring. No other teams were interested.
Suddenly, reality hit like a ton of bricks.
He had a 5-year-old son to take care of. If the NFL wasn’t happening, he had to find another job.
So he called his friend, who worked as a private fisherman. His friend always told him, “Whenever you wanna come down here and fish and make some money, I’m one phone call away.”
So he took him up on the offer, driving down to Key West to spend his days at sea, fishing for 4-foot mahi-mahi.
A lot of people in his position would’ve accepted reality. Faced facts and let their dream die.
But out on that boat, D’Ernest couldn’t shake the feeling that he was wasting his potential.
Late at night, with the salt still crusted in the creases of his palms, he’d call his mom and say, “I don’t belong on that fishing boat, I belong on that field.”
After a month and a half, Johnson finally listened to that internal voice. He told his friend that he appreciated the opportunity, but he had to go and chase his dream.
He moved eight hours north to Gainesville to live with his girlfriend, Jasmin, and her mother.
It was a dark time for him.
“[Jasmin] didn’t give up on me,” D’Ernest said. “She believed in me more than I believed in myself at that moment.”
He became a personal trainer. That way, he could make money while staying in shape for a professional opportunity.
That’s when a new pro league – the Alliance of American Football – kicked off. It was a second chance for former college stars to play football again.
“This was the last chance hotel,” said Tim Ruskell, former GM of the Orlando Apollos, “If it wasn’t gonna happen here, you weren’t gonna play.”
A few of Johnson’s old college teammates had signed with the Apollos, so D’Ernest called Ruskell nonstop.
“I was calling [him] every day, just ‘Hey, do you guys have any openings? How many running backs do you have? Do you need any running backs?'”
It was a family effort. Between phone calls from D’Ernest, his girlfriend sent messages to all the AAF social media accounts while his mom emailed anyone connected to teams north of the border in the CFL.
The Apollos ended up cutting two running backs in training camp. They called Johnson the next day.
As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
He came in as the fifth man on the depth chart. There was no guarantee that he’d even make the team. But head coach Steve Spurrier – yes, 7-time SEC Coach of the Year, Steve Spurrier – saw something in him.
It had been 413 days since his last college game when he first took the field in the AAF. But if there was any rust, D’Ernest shook it off quickly.
After starting the year as the third-string running back, he worked his way into becoming one of the top players in the league. In eight games, he ran for 372 yards and 2 touchdowns.
Then, after the eighth week, the league folded.
Just like that, he was out of a job – again.
It was around that time that he met former Olympic sprinter Tim Montgomery and started training with him.
The workouts were on a different level.
“D’Ernest threw up every single day,” Montgomery said, “But he would show up the next day, sore, tired, and ready to go. And that told me a lot about him.”
That’s when he got called in for workouts with the New England Patriots, Green Bay Packers, and Cleveland Browns. But they all let him go.
But he knew that if he kept getting his foot in the door, eventually, someone had to let him in.
He knew he belonged in the NFL. It would just take time for reality to catch up.
“I was down, I’m not going to lie, I was down,” he said.
“Times watching NFL preseason games, I was like, ‘Man, I know I can play with these guys.’ But that actually motivated me just to continue to work hard because something’s going to come out of the hard work that I put in.”
Finally, his faith was rewarded: a spot opened up in Cleveland.
He signed to the Browns’ 90-man roster in May of 2019, where he became a backup to Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt.
“Whenever my number is called, I’m just going to go out there and make the best of every opportunity given.”
After playing sparingly in his first two seasons, he made his first career start on October 21st, 2021. He rushed for 146 yards and a touchdown, being named Player of the Game and FedEx Ground Player of the Week.
He finished that season with 671 scrimmage yards and 3 total touchdowns.
“Everything I’ve been through, just growing up, having this dream of making it to the NFL…it was just one of the biggest moments of my life, man, just being able to say you finally made it.”
Fast forward to 2025: D’Ernest Johnson is in his seventh season. He’s stuck around twice as long as the average NFL player.
This past summer, he hosted his 3rd annual SlowGrind Foundation free youth football camp at Immokalee High School.
It’s his way of giving back and showing kids in his hometown what’s possible with hard work and determination.
“To see how far I came and to know what it took. The slow grind, you have to trust the process no matter what you’re going through…and believe in yourself.”
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