Johnson tried to get Nolen to be his teammate at Michigan
Defensive lineman Walter Nolen and cornerback Will Johnson, the Arizona Cardinals’ top two selections in the 2025 NFL draft, are teammates for the first time. Nolen played collegiately for Texas A&M and then Ole Miss. Johnson played for Michigan.
However, had things gone differently a few years ago, this would not have been the first time they were teammates.
Johnson, when he was introduced to the media on Thursday at the Cardinals’ team headquarters in Tempe, revealed that he tried to get Nolen to choose Michigan.
“When we were getting recruited out of high school, we were both trying to play together, and that didn’t end up working out,” he explained. “One of my teammates that I was at with Michigan, he was from Memphis, and Walter obviously was a big name coming out of high school, and we were trying to get him at Michigan.
“I was kind of the the frontrunner for our class, so I was just trying to do whatever I could to get him to come to Michigan, so I would do things like when we were in high school. I went down to Martin Luther King High School and he was thinking about coming to Detroit to go to high school, so I went down there with him just to get him acclimated to that that type of scene. He visited Michigan a bunch of times and we hung out.”
Ultimately, Nolen did not go to Michigan.
This time, there was no recruiting. The Cardinals selected both players and now they are NFL teammates.
Now it is their job to be a good as pros as they were in college.
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