Emmett Johnson Camp Update — August 23: The Touchdown Counted This Time
2026 NFL Season · Sunday, Aug 23
Johnson punched in a one-yard score in Tampa a week after having one wiped off the board, and the running backs coach spent his media session praising the rookie's physicality while naming the exact things he still has to clean up. The two-spot battle now has names attached.
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Emmett Johnson scored from a yard out in Saturday's 16-to-15 loss in Tampa, finishing the touchdown drive that rookie quarterback Garrett Nussmeier ran — and this one stood, a week after his first professional touchdown was wiped away by penalty, per Pete Sweeney's recap at the Kansas City Star. It came against Tampa Bay's reserves in a game Kansas City's veterans mostly watched, which is the honest label, but it is now two productive preseason outings in two tries for the fifth-round rookie.
The more useful evidence this week came from the coach whose room he lives in. Running backs coach DeMarco Murray, speaking with Joshua Schulman at Sports Illustrated's Chiefs site, said Johnson "ran the ball extremely hard, was physical behind his pads" in the preseason work so far and praised his versatility as a pass catcher — then itemized the homework: Johnson needs to "clean up some footwork details, some route depth." Murray framed the backup competition around two names, Johnson and fellow rookie Brashard Smith, and made the terms explicit for Smith too, saying Smith "knew he had to grow in the protection game." That is a position coach describing a live battle, with passing-down trust as the currency — which happens to be the exact usage we flagged in June, when we previewed Johnson as a rookie whose role did not exist yet behind Kenneth Walker, whatever Andy Reid's LeSean McCoy comparison implied. Two games of hard running and a coach reciting his pass-game virtues is how a role starts existing.
What the week did not supply is the specific charting: nobody published his snap or route counts, so the passing-down share relative to Smith stays unverified. What to watch now is concrete: how the touches and pass-protection reps split in Friday's finale against Seattle, and then the roster itself — cutdown to 53 is next Sunday, and the shape of the backfield Kansas City keeps will say more than any August box score. We'll check after cut day.
_Data via nflverse._
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