Football: Johnson delivers for Cajun defense

Tim Buckley, Daily Advertiser, November 19, 2013

UL linebacker Trae Johnson (38), shown here celebrating a big play during last year’s New Orleans Bowl win, is coming off the best game of his career with the Ragin’ Cajuns. / Paul Kieu/The Advertiser

In his first start of the season, UL junior linebacker Trae Johnson merely made a team-high 12 total tackles including 10 solo stops and two TFLs in the Ragin’ Cajuns 35-21 win last Saturday at Georgia State.

The biggest of them all came with the Panthers facing fourth-and-3 at the UL 16-yard line, and the Cajuns clinging to a 28-21 lead early in the fourth quarter at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

Georgia State, winless and with nothing to loss beyond yet another game, decided to go for it.

But Johnson pulled down running back Kyler Neal a yard shy of a first down, getting UL’s defense – which is penetrable at times, but more than not lately has answered challenges in the red zone – off the hook.

Johnson attributed the stop to simple trust of teammates.

“It’s something we’ve been going through the whole season,” he said.

Seven plays after Johnson pulled down Neal, the Cajuns came up with a 13-yard Terrance Broadway touchdown pass to Jamal Robinson that helped ensure UL would win its eighth in a row, improve to 8-2 and remain undefeated in Sun Belt Conference play at 5-0.

Cajuns coach Mark Hudspeth sensed Johnson, who was starting only because Tig Barksdale was out with a hand injury, had it in him all along.

It apparently was just a matter of yanking it out.

“I’m gonna be honest with you: “That’s what we’ve been waiting to see from Trae Johnson for three-and-a-half years, and it showed up (Saturday), and I was very glad to see it,” Hudspeth said.

Slight exaggeration.

Johnson actually has been in the UL program fewer than three full seasons.

As a true freshman in 2011, he made four starts – in the season’s first four games, before yielding way to Jake Molbert – and played in 12 games.

In any event, Johnson – a Jackson, Miss., native and a first-team Mississippi all-state pick as a high school senior – seemed to know all along Saturday what Hudspeth only sensed.

That he really did have it in him, that is.

Though he played a mostly reserve role and on special teams last season, making 29 total tackles including 22 solo stops, the product of Mendenhall High in Mendenhall, Miss., came up big for the Cajuns late in 2012.

After Molbert sustained a late-season ACL tear, Johnson started UL’s regular-season finale at Florida Atlantic and made six tackles.

He started in the Cajuns’ New Orleans Bowl win over East Carolina in the Superdome as well, coming up with a then career-high eight tackles including seven solos as UL closed 9-4 for a second straight year.

So with Barksdale out last Saturday – he hopes return when the Cajuns, who are idle this Saturday, play host on Nov. 30 to UL Monroe in a key Sun Belt game – Johnson was quite confident about what he could contribute.

“I had just started getting into the rotation a couple weeks prior, and my coach just trusted me,” Johnson said. “And I was able to do some of the same stuff I did last year at the end of the season.”

Johnson actually had gotten snaps behind Barksdale in UL’s Nov. 7 Sun Belt win over Troy, including some in a critical third-quarter red-zone sequence in which the Cajuns – up 35-26 in an eventual 41-36 win – kept the Trojans out of the end zone.

Between that and a strong week of practice, Johnson was tapped when it came to choose a starter for the Georgia State game.

He got the call over Tyren Alexander, a sophomore from Breaux Bridge High who started in UL wins earlier this season over Nicholls State, Akron, Texas State and Western Kentucky.

“The guy is a little older, a little more mature, and he seems to be just be in the right positions a little bit more,” Hudspeth said of the decision to go with Johnson over Alexander.

Insider linebacker Justin Anderson and Buck linebacker Dominique Tovell have been mainstays for the Cajuns in their 3-4 base/multiple-look defense.

But with four different players getting starts this season at one linebacker spot in Johnson, Barksdale, Alexander and Andrew Hebert, and Boris Anyama, Chris Hill and Al Riles all getting starts at another linebacker position, the result has been a revolving door that Hudspeth seems to see as a good thing.

That door – directed by first-year defensive coordinator and linebackers coach James Willis – seems to have consistently stopped and spit out the right linebacker throughout UL’s current win streak.

“Here we are in Week 10,” Hudspeth said, “and we still have good competition at some positions, where it’s a weekly decision sometimes based on how well they practice.”