Brian Johnson took the blame for last year’s Eagles. Now, he’s a ‘heavy hitter’ with the high-powered Commanders.

ASHBURN, Va. — There was a plan. For the Washington Commanders, that wasn’t half the battle, it was all of it. They won four games last season and lost their final eight. Their last winning season was in 2016.

An important part of the early plan was Josh Harris firing coach Ron Rivera and hiring Dan Quinn. Once on board, Quinn was in alignment with Harris and general manager Adam Peters: The Commanders had the second pick in the draft, and they knew they were going to be taking a quarterback. It was time to build an infrastructure.

“There’s a real process we’re going to go through to make sure we’re going to support the hell out of this player that’s not even here yet,” Quinn said. “Putting the whole group together, we knew we wanted some heavy hitters. We wanted to surround the offense, the quarterback, with as many of those heavy hitters as we could.”

Quinn hired Kliff Kingsbury, once considered one of the best up-and-coming offensive minds in football, as his offensive coordinator after Kingsbury’s sabbatical away from the game and, at times, the country. Another of those “heavy hitters” was Brian Johnson, the offensive coordinator the Eagles fired at the end of last season. Quinn had been following Johnson’s path since the latter’s days as the quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator at the University of Florida. He had his eye on Johnson again when Nick Sirianni hired him as the Eagles’ quarterbacks coach in 2021.

“This is a coach that you want to stay connected to,” Quinn said.

The Eagles, however, did not agree. Johnson, who helped Jalen Hurts develop into a quarterback who took the Eagles to the Super Bowl in his second full season as a starter, was fired a week after the colossal collapse finished with a wild-card loss in Tampa Bay last January. The offensive scheme that held the Eagles back might have mostly been Sirianni’s — and the head coach admitted it got stale — but Johnson was the one calling the plays that rarely worked, and after the Eagles decided to keep Sirianni, the coach needed to overhaul his staff and cede control of the offense.

Johnson’s first year as offensive coordinator resulted in the Eagles dropping from third to eighth in total yards and third to seventh in points scored. The fall wasn’t precipitous, but it was bad enough that someone had to go, and if it wasn’t going to be Sirianni, it had to be Johnson.

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Quinn and the Commanders hired Johnson to be the team’s assistant head coach and offensive pass game coordinator three weeks after the Eagles fired him and after Washington interviewed him for the job that eventually went to Kingsbury. It’s Kingsbury’s offense, and Tavita Pritchard was retained by Quinn and remains Washington’s quarterbacks coach, but Johnson’s influence is involved in a lot of what happens before and after the ball is snapped to star rookie Jayden Daniels.

Marcus Mariota, Daniels’ backup who backed up Hurts on the Eagles last season, said Johnson has done a great job “banding all the positions together.”

Sirianni, too, was asked this week about Johnson and said he can see Johnson’s influence when he watches Washington’s offense on tape.

“You can see how the quarterback is playing,” Sirianni said Wednesday. “Brian has something to do with that, that’s for sure.”

How so?

Mariota said he sees Johnson’s influence in the way Daniels and the offense execute zone-reads, run-pass options, passing concepts, and how Daniels has trained his eyes to play like a veteran quarterback during his rookie season.

“He’s one of the smartest offensive minds I’ve been around, honestly,” Kingsbury said. “The things he picks up in the pass game, the run game, a lot of the red-zone concepts we’ve hit in big moments have been things he’s brought in and seen. His influence, just being able to share kind of some things he used with Jalen there in Philly — some things that worked, some things he wished he would’ve done differently — with Jayden has been huge.”

Quarterbacks have been Johnson’s calling card. He worked with Dak Prescott at Mississippi State, coached Kyle Trask to a school-record 43 passing touchdowns in one season at Florida, and then was part of the core group of people responsible for helping Hurts, a player he has a long history with, become an MVP-caliber quarterback in 2022 before overseeing his regression in 2023.

Daniels, who will be named offensive rookie of the year in a few weeks, is next. Johnson turns 38 next month and said Thursday that he was familiar with Daniels from back when the quarterback was a high school recruit taking a visit to Florida. Johnson followed his progress through college and then saw up close in rookie camp what his next project was all about.

“You could tell he’s very, very serious and very eager,” Johnson said. “The way he works at it has been incredible to watch.”

» READ MORE: The Commanders plan to treat Jalen Hurts like a running back — and ‘hit him that way’

Johnson, Eagles fans may remember, is not the type to pop off during interviews with reporters. So it wasn’t a surprise, when he was asked Thursday about what it meant to be with this Commanders team heading back to Philadelphia this weekend, that he avoided the topic.

“This is a great opportunity,” Johnson said. “I’m really happy for everybody in this building to get to this point and earn their way to this point throughout the course of the season. It should be a great one up there at the Linc on Sunday.”

He also deftly danced around another question about whether he’s been in contact with people in the Eagles organization.

“The beauty of this game is the relationships,” Johnson said. “You spend so much time with people in whatever building you’ve been in throughout the course — for me 15 years — of coaching. So whether that’s guys that I coached at Mississippi State, or guys that I coached in Philadelphia, or people that I’ve worked with, those relationships last a lifetime.”

Count the Commanders as having quite a few candidates who will be in Johnson’s Rolodex into the future.

“Being here, I can’t say enough about [Quinn] and the organization,” Johnson said. “It’s been really, really refreshing in terms of coming in every single day and working toward a common goal and watching these players continue to develop and grow and get better week in and week out. I’m really, really excited to be here. It’s been a great experience for me so far.”

It’s certainly not over yet. But Mariota called this job a “stepping stone” for Johnson, a coach he said has an “awesome future in front of him.”

“It’s hard to play in Philly. It’s hard to coach in Philly,” Mariota said. “To take all that happened last season and turn it into a positive, it’s been really cool to see.

“It says a lot about who he is and the adversity he dealt with, the challenges. All of that, I think, has helped him grow. It’s cool to see him bring all of that here, and as he continues forward I think he’ll continue to use all that he’s learned. He’s an unbelievable person, an unbelievable man, and we’re thankful he’s here.”

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