EDITOR’S NOTE: Every day until Aug. 29, Creg Stephenson is counting down significant numbers in Alabama football history, both in the lead-up to the 2025 football season and in commemoration of the Crimson Tide’s first national championship 100 years ago. The number could be attached to a year, a uniform number or even a football-specific statistic. We hope you enjoy.

Few who saw the walk-on running back from tiny Sulligent High School in the fall of 2004 would have guessed that he would become a team captain and first-team All-American by the time his career ended at Alabama.

But that’s exactly what happened with Rashad Johnson, who after moving to defense in 2006 became one of the stars of the early Nick Saban era with the Crimson Tide. He later played nine years in the NFL and now makes his living as a coach.

Johnson was a fine high school player at Sulligent, but his best scholarship offer came from then-Division II North Alabama. Instead of going the small-college route, however, he bet on himself and walked on with the Crimson Tide under then-head coach Mike Shula.

“I was fortunate enough that my parents allowed me to step out on my dream, on what I wanted to do,” Johnson said in 2016 radio interview. “And I just chased it. It was an interesting transition from being a walk-on and having to go through the stages of being a walk-on, but I just kept my faith. I’ve always been a man of God, always been a faithful man that understands there’s going to be trials, there’s going to be hard times, but there’s always victory on the other side of it. So I just continued to endure. I just continued to push forward and did what I knew was right.”

After redshirting as a true freshman, Johnson played in all 13 games at Alabama in 2005 on kick-coverage units while still working as a scout-team running back. Shula and the other Alabama coaches convinced him to move to defense as a redshirt sophomore and he totaled 33 tackles and two forced fumbles in a reserve role in 2006.

But things took off for Johnson upon Saban’s arrival prior to the 2007 season. As starting free safety for the Crimson Tide, he totaled 94 tackles, six tackles for loss and an SEC-best six interceptions — securing first-team all-conference honors.

“He’s instinctive, he’s got really good range, he’s got great understanding of football in general,” Saban told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2008. “And he’s got good hands and good ball judgment. So all those combinations of things are going to put him in the right place to make plays a lot of the time.”

Alabama won the SEC West title in Johnson’s senior season of 2008, and he again had an outstanding year. He totaled 89 tackles, five tackles for loss, two forced fumbles and five interceptions — two of which he returned for touchdowns.

Johnson had a career day in a 27-21 overtime win over LSU in early November — Saban’s first journey back to Baton Rouge as Alabama’s coach. Johnson had a pick-six early in the game, and a game-clinching interception in overtime.

After the season, Johnson was named a first-team All-American. He’d quit playing in the kicking game by that time, but Saban noted “he’d be the best special teams player on our team if we played him on special teams.”Johnson was also recognized for his leadership, and was named a permanent team captain in each of his final two college seasons. “I would be pleased if my children had the character of Rashad,” Saban once said.

Johnson was a third-round pick of the Arizona Cardinals in 2009, and played eight seasons with that team and one with the Tennessee Titans before hanging up his helmet. Famously, he lost the tip of his left middle finger following an injury suffered during a game with the New Orleans Saints in 2013.

Johnson later spent four years as Alabama’s radio sideline reporter and as a member of the program’s support staff. He left Tuscaloosa in 2022 to become assistant secondary coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a position he still holds.

Johnson’s rise as a star player coincided with Saban’s arrival at Alabama in 2007. But even Johnson said he never foresaw nearly two decades of national championship contention for the Crimson Tide.

“I knew the turn was happening when Coach Saban got there,” Johnson told AL.com in 2019. “It was maybe a couple of weeks into it, just seeing the way he did things. He was the standard. He didn’t slow down. He was there 15 hours a day, putting in the work.

“You knew ‘this thing is going to go places,’ because the guy in charge is putting in just as much work as the guys around him, and forcing everybody else to get into that grind as well. I don’t know if I saw the sustainability of what we have now, but I definitely saw championships coming.”

Coming Sunday: Our countdown to kickoff continues with No. 48, when the SEC’s greatest football rivalry was reborn.