NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- For preseason road trips to Oakland and Miami, 14-year veteran receiver Andre Johnson found a perk on the plane: A row to himself.

A window guy, he set himself up and no one bothered him.

But when the Tennessee Titans boarded their flight to Detroit on Sept. 17, that changed.

"Tajae Sharpe walks by and asks if anybody is sitting there," Johnson said. "And I don’t know if he knew what response he would get. I was like, 'Yeah man, you can go ahead and sit down.' He’s been sitting there ever since."

Sharpe, 21, and Johnson, 35, talk about all kind of things on a Titans flight. with a heavy splash of football. They also nap.

"He asks about certain situations and stuff like that," Johnson said. "Sometimes he asks about old games I played in. It’s fun to sit there and talk about stuff like that, to have a young guy pick your brain."

"That’s my boy," Sharpe said. "That’s like my big brother. I didn’t know he usually sat on the plane alone. We sit next to each other on the plane every week, talk about the game, go over our receiver test and things like that."

Rookie Tajae Sharpe leads Titans wide receivers with 18 catches. Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

A lot of young players on a lot of NFL plane trips would steer clear of a guy with a Hall of Fame resume who was in a comfortable situation.

"I think most guys or rookies probably wouldn’t ask," Johnson said. "Probably because you don’t know what response you’ll get. Some guys can be kind of harsh on rookies. But he’s never shied away from that.

"He’s actually a funny guy, likes to crack jokes a lot, keeps the group laughing. At the same time he’s always asked questions, and that’s the one thing I’ve always liked about him."

Johnson likes telling stories and dispensing football knowledge, and knows the league is filled with a lot of young players who don’t have a sense of history or a desire to call on a veteran resource.

Sharpe impressed everyone around him after arriving as a fifth-round pick out of UMass.

In organized team activities, he quickly moved into the starting X spot. In the preseason he was quarterback Marcus Mariota's favorite receiver. In the season opener against Minnesota, he was targeted a game-high 11 times and caught seven passes for 76 yards.

Things have now slowed down, in part because Sharpe has sped up, rushing some things as defenses adjust to him.

Still, on a team where a tight end (Delanie Walker) and a running back (DeMarco Murray) rank as the most reliable targets, Sharpe is the team’s second-leading pass-catcher with 18 catches for 189 yards.

"He's been a great teammate and he's an even better person. As a young receiver, just to have his presence, with the things that he's done in this league, it's just means a lot to me that I have a guy like him." Tajae Sharpe on Andre Johnson

"You’re going to go through that," Johnson said of two games with just five catches for Sharpe. "That’s not something I would say he needs to panic about. He’s learning. You want to always go out and do things right, and you see that with him.

“That’s the thing I like so much about him. He’s never satisfied with what’s going on. He does something wrong, he gets upset. You can see it, you can tell he’s unhappy with what he’s done. That’s a great thing for him to have."

When Johnson was a Houston rookie in 2003, there was no veteran receiver on the Texans for him to sit next to.

"That was something I wish I had," Johnson said. "I had to go to guys at different positions to kind of learn things, I was more talking to (cornerback) Aaron Glenn and (linebacker) Jamie Sharper."

Later in his career he sat next to fellow receiver Kevin Walter during their time together on the Texans.

In Nashville, Sharpe has handled himself just as the new Titans regime likes. He's a football-first guy.

After practice he catches additional passes thrown by a Jugs machine. Thursday after his regular routine, he stood as close as possible to it, catching passes right as they came off the spinning rubber circles that throw the ball.

He catches 50 from each side, and if he drops one he re-starts, though he said if he drops one it’s usually the first one as he times up the routine. The work certainly helps strengthen his hands, and if he can react that quickly to a ball, he should be at an advantage when he has more time before a pass gets to him.

He certainly rates Johnson as a bigger resource than the machine.

"He’s been a great teammate and he’s an even better person," Sharpe said. "As a young receiver, just to have his presence, with the things that he’s done in this league, it’s just means a lot to me that I have a guy like him."