Tez Johnson: The Seventh-Round Pick Who Outscored Most of the First Round
Five touchdowns. That’s what a 235th overall pick produced in his first NFL season while most of the players drafted ahead of him were fighting for roster spots. Tez Johnson – real name Keyonteze Johnson – plays wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, wears number 15, and finished his 2025 rookie campaign with 28 receptions for 322 yards on 44 targets. He also does a backflip in the end zone. At 23, he’s already one of the better stories in the league, and not just because of the numbers.
Pinson, Alabama – What He Calls “the Trenches”
Johnson was born May 18, 2002, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father died by suicide when Tez was an infant. The family moved to Pinson, a small city northeast of Birmingham, where Johnson grew up in subsidized housing. “Most people call it the ghetto,” he said in one interview. “I call it the trenches.” His mother worked to keep her children away from what was happening in the neighborhood – the gangs, the violence – but Johnson saw plenty anyway. Football became the thing he could control. By the time he was 15, he was one of the better players in the state of Alabama, which is not a small claim.
That same year, a parent-teacher conference changed his life. His biological mother met with Patrick Nix, who coached at Pinson Valley High School and was also the father of a quarterback named Bo. The situation at home had become difficult enough that Patrick asked, right there in the meeting: what if Tez comes home with us for a few days? Those few days became permanent. Johnson has been clear that his biological family never left the picture – he flew his birth mother and siblings to Eugene for his birthday in May 2024, their first visit, and watched her skip the campus tour to go straight to Autzen Stadium. But the Nix household became home.
Bo Nix Is His Brother – Here’s What That Actually Means
There was no formal legal adoption. The family has said so openly. Krista Nix put it plainly in one interview: “That’s why I am quick to say he does not wear ‘Nix’ on the back of his jersey. But in our households and in our hearts, he is a Nix.” Johnson’s own description is simpler: “Bo Nix is my brother, and I was adopted by the Nix family on the 23rd of April in 2018. I literally never left. I got a bio family, and I have the Nix family, so I got one big happy family.”
Bo Nix was the starting quarterback at Pinson Valley. Johnson initially played quarterback too, but his speed and instincts as a route runner were obvious enough that the switch happened quickly. By his junior season, he caught 106 passes for 1,457 yards and 10 touchdowns, including one game with 17 catches, 247 yards, and three scores. That’s not a high school stat line – that’s a number that would lead a mid-major college program. Pinson Valley won the Class 6A state championship that year, with Bo throwing and Tez catching.
Troy, the Transfer Portal, and a Second Act at Oregon
Johnson enrolled at Troy in 2020. As a true freshman he played 11 games, caught 18 passes for 211 yards. By 2021 he was the team’s leading receiver with 67 catches, 735 yards, and four touchdowns – third-team All-Sun Belt Conference. He held that role as Troy’s top target in 2022 too: 56 receptions, 863 yards, four more scores. Over two full seasons, he accumulated more receiving yards than any Sun Belt receiver during that span.
Then he entered the transfer portal. The destination was Oregon, where Bo Nix had transferred after six seasons at Auburn, and where their partnership picked up almost exactly where it left off. Johnson stepped into a supporting role behind receiver Troy Franklin, but the production was anything but secondary. In 2023 he set Oregon’s single-season record with 86 receptions – that record still stands – for 1,182 yards and 10 touchdowns. The 2024 season was 83 catches, 898 yards, 10 touchdowns in just 12 games. In the Big Ten Championship Game against Penn State, he caught 11 passes for 181 yards and a touchdown and was named MVP. Four days later, Bo Nix was already projected as a first-round pick. Tez was projected as… not much, according to most draft boards.
Draft Night: Pick 235, Seventh Round, Tampa Bay
The knock was obvious and it was size. At 5-10 and 165 pounds, Johnson is undersized by NFL standards for any receiver position, but particularly at the boundary where he’d need to contest physical corners. His 40 time of 4.51 seconds is good without being exceptional. Scouts liked his instincts, his route tempo disguise, his YAC ability – and then looked at the frame and moved on. He slid. Bo Nix went 12th overall to Denver in 2024. Tez waited until pick 235 in 2025, when GM Jason Licht and head coach Todd Bowles called to tell him he was a Buccaneer.
He signed a four-year, $4.32 million contract in May 2025. At rookie minicamp, he talked about Baker Mayfield the way a fan would: “That fire, that passion he plays with – Baker carrying Bosa on his shoulder and still throws the ball. That’s the fire.” The quote is slightly incoherent and completely genuine. He also mentioned he was roommates in college with Bucky Irving, who was already on the Buccaneers roster. Tampa was not a cold room to walk into.
How a Seventh-Rounder Ended Up on Monday Night Football
The short answer: the Buccaneers got hurt. Mike Evans fractured his collarbone. Chris Godwin broke his fibula. Jalen McMillan had neck issues that cost him 13 games. Starting in Week 6 – a 45-yard touchdown catch from Mayfield against the 49ers, his first NFL score – Johnson was suddenly seeing 57 to 73 percent of Tampa’s offensive snaps for seven straight weeks. That’s a starter’s workload for a player who was drafted with the last handful of picks in the draft.
What he did with it was notable. From roughly Week 5 through Week 12, he posted 22 receptions for 274 yards and five touchdowns on 34 targets. In Week 10 against the Patriots, mic’d up for the broadcast, he caught four passes for 42 yards and two touchdowns in a game the Buccaneers lost 28-23. The backflip celebration happened in front of the full Tampa crowd. By then, he was third among all NFL players in receiving touchdowns since Week 6, and first among all rookies not named Emeka Egbuka – who was also a Buccaneer, drafted in the first round, and had the decency to only slightly outscore him.
Then Evans and Godwin Came Back
This is the less flattering part of the story, and it’s worth being direct about: once the veteran receivers returned to health, Johnson became largely irrelevant. Over the final five games of the season, he caught four passes for 18 yards. His snap count dropped to 15-25 percent, and in two of those games he didn’t catch a single pass. The volume he had in October and November was entirely a product of circumstance, not a new permanent role in the offense.
That’s not a condemnation. Most seventh-round picks don’t get five touchdowns in their first year under any circumstances. CBS Sports noted that his “workload faded down the stretch as the receiving corps got healthy, but he made a solid first impression.” The official Buccaneers rookie review was more specific: he “thrived in space with instinctiveness on routes,” showed “early acceleration and slipperiness after the catch,” and “disguises tempo of routes and breaks to generate separation.” Those are real skills. The question for 2026 is whether there’s enough room to use them.
What His Game Actually Looks Like
Johnson plays almost exclusively in the slot, which is where his physical profile makes the most sense. He’s not winning contested catches on the outside against press corners – at 165 pounds, that’s not the argument. The argument is something different. He changes speed through his routes in a way that creates separation without elite straight-line speed. He catches a quick slant and turns what should be a five-yard gain into twelve. On screen passes and jet sweeps, he’s one of the harder backs and receivers in the league to get down cleanly.
The Buccaneers also used him on punt returns, where his near-touchdown in the preseason against Pittsburgh gave Tampa a genuine weapon they hadn’t had. His 4.51 forty is fast enough; his acceleration out of breaks is the more relevant number and it doesn’t show up on a combine sheet. New offensive coordinator Zac Robinson – who spent years under Sean McVay in Los Angeles – has publicly said he plans to use Johnson’s speed within the structure of the offense. Robinson’s scheme at its best features exactly the kind of quick-release, space-creation routes that suit a receiver of Johnson’s dimensions.
The 2026 Picture Is Complicated
Mike Evans is gone – he signed with the San Francisco 49ers in free agency, ending an eleven-year run in Tampa. That opens targets. But Emeka Egbuka, the first-round pick who caught six touchdowns as a rookie, is the clear ascending talent in that room. Chris Godwin is still there and will absorb a significant target share when healthy. Jalen McMillan, who missed most of 2025 with a neck injury, flashed real ability in 2024 and has something to prove. Tampa also drafted Ted Hurst in the third round of the 2026 draft, and the receivers coach has been vocal about what Hurst can do.
Johnson is probably fifth on that depth chart right now. That’s not a comfortable position for someone who just had five touchdowns. The Fantasy Footballers flagged in March 2026 that he “could be buried on the depth chart again in his sophomore season,” which is an honest read. RotoBaller put it similarly: “facing an uphill battle for playing time.” What changes the calculation is injury – the same injuries that made him relevant in 2025 could do so again in 2026, and Baker Mayfield clearly trusts him. The 92-yard touchdown drive against New England that Johnson finished with a catch wasn’t a panic play. It was a designed target to a receiver Mayfield wanted the ball in that moment.
The Number That Doesn’t Quite Add Up
Here’s something worth sitting with: Johnson set Oregon’s single-season reception record twice – 86 catches in 2023, 83 in 2024. He led the Sun Belt in receiving over two years at Troy. He was Big Ten Championship MVP. By any reasonable standard, that’s a first- or second-round talent on paper. The seventh-round grade is almost entirely explained by one variable: he’s 165 pounds. Strip that concern away and you have one of the more productive college receivers in recent memory.
Whether the NFL’s skepticism about his frame is correct will take more than one season to know. Tyler Lockett plays at 5-10. Wes Welker played at 5-9. Neither of those is an exact comparison – Welker was a different kind of route runner, Lockett a different kind of athlete – but the general category of undersized slot receiver who makes a career out of being impossible to cover in space is a real and recurring player type in the modern NFL. Johnson’s first year didn’t answer the question. It just kept it interesting.
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