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Greg Auman
NFC South Reporter
Kameron Johnson has only had about six weeks and a dozen or so practices with the Bucs, but the undrafted rookie receiver’s favorite moments are when he makes a catch or a move in the open field and someone walks up a minute later.
“People start asking: ‘Where are you from? Where’d you go to school at?'” Johnson said. “They know nothing about Barton. A lot of people don’t know about Barton.”
To answer the basic questions, as Johnson does proudly: Barton College is in Wilson, N.C., and its nickname is the Bulldogs. They play in Division II, and Johnson was part of their first football team when the program relaunched in 2020, actually playing their first four games in spring 2021 due to COVID-19.
Barton had last played football in 1950, when it was Atlantic Christian College, and on the first play of the reboot, Johnson lined up at receiver, got the ball on a reverse and threw a 58-yard touchdown pass to his quarterback. Now, after 51 catches for 875 yards and 7 TDs last season, he’s the first Barton player to sign with an NFL team.
“It’s definitely like a dream come true,” he said, sitting in the Bucs’ cafeteria after a morning practice last week. “Just watching greats like Mike [Evans] and Chris [Godwin], trying to be a sponge as much as I can. Being out there on the practice field, I see I belong at this level, because I can definitely compete with everybody out there.”
Undrafted rookies are generally long shots to stick on an NFL roster, and of the 90 players on the Bucs’ roster, Johnson might seem the most unlikely on paper. He’s the only one sharing a jersey number with another player, as both he and former first-round draft pick Joe Tryon-Shoyinka are wearing No. 9 right now. If Johnson were to make it through final cuts, he’d get a new number.
Go back four years, and he was graduating high school in Rocky Mount, N.C., as a 5-foot-6, 140-pound quarterback. At that size, he had no…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/bucs-rookie-receiver-kameron-johnson-attempting-jump-from-div-ii-nfl
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Publish date : 2024-06-10 13:16:29
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