The worst loss of Ben Johnson’s Bears tenure was unquestionably the second game of last season, when he returned to Ford Field and left with a 52-21 defeat.
The second-worst might have been the second game of this season — and that was before Bears quarterback Caleb Williams pulled his hamstring midway through the fourth quarter of a sloppy, soggy 9-3 loss to the Vikings.
After talking openly about wanting to score the most points in NFL history, and then posting 59 in the opener, Johnson engineered an offense that scored three.
The much-ballyhooed chess match between Johnson and Brian Flores went to the Vikings’ defensive coordinator, who used an extreme blitz rate to keep the coach and quarterback on their heels. After averaging 27.5 points in his career against Flores, Johnson managed just three.
In a rainstorm, Flores blitzed Williams on 27 of his 33 dropbacks. That 82% rate would have been the third-highest in any game since 2018, per NFL Next Gen Stats. The Vikings shifted to the Bears’ right, too, trying to take away their most successful direction on run plays.
Williams won’t practice this week. While Johnson refused to rule him out for Monday night, it seems likely that backup Tyson Bagent will face the Eagles.
The most alarming part of Sunday’s result, though, was the fact that Johnson needs to fix problems that go far beyond who’s playing quarterback.
The Bears were brutal in the red zone, bad on their field goal attempts and needed to regroup at halftime for their run game to improve. The penalties they committed, though, gnawed most at Johnson on Monday afternoon.
“The penalties were a major factor, more so than the weather or anything other …” he said. “It was the penalties and things that we really hadn’t seen in practice. They showed up there on game day.”
In the second quarter, the Bears committed three-straight penalties on offense — an illegal shift, holding and intentional grounding — and then, after one clean play, a false start on, of all people, center Garrett Bradbury.
“We always ask ourselves, ‘Was it us or them?’” guard Jonah Jackson said. “And it was an ‘us’ situation.”
That’s not as reassuring as it sounds.
They didn’t commit an offensive penalty in the second half, but by then the damage was done.
The Bears have a penalty problem. Sunday’s games, they are tied for the third-most flags in the NFL, with 20. Only the Panthers and the Chargers have been flagged more on offense than the Bears’ 12.
“Even when we felt like we were getting a little momentum and staying ahead of the schedule there, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot a couple times,” Johnson said.
They found other ways to do it, too.
In the first half, the Bears’ two running backs — D’Andre Swift and Kyle Monangai — ran 12 times for just 27 yards. The Bears marched down to the 1-yard line on the first drive of the third quarter, only for Swift to fumble on first-and-goal.
Williams likely would have run for a touchdown from the 6 on the play in which he crumpled to the ground. Johnson was frustrated by the Bears’ inability to score on three Bagent throws from the Vikings’ 12 in the game’s final seconds. On the first, Bagent threw incomplete to Luther Burden along the left sideline. On the second, he threw incomplete at the feet of tight end Colston Loveland at the goal line. And on the third, he was sacked by Dallas Turner after the clock expired.
“You start with a first-and-goal from the 1, a first-and-goal from the 6 and … three shots at the end of the game — and we end up getting zero points out of all three of those opportunities,” Johnson said. “That’s really the tale of the second half.”
The Bears reached the 5-yard line and twice and didn’t score either time. They didn’t score at all in the red zone. Despite their 59-point outburst in Week 1, the Bears rank 19th in red zone percentage through Sunday.
That needs fixing. So does the field goal operation.
Playing his second game, Beau Gardner snapped the ball high on the Bears’ first attempt, a 50-yard Cairo Santos field goal. The second snap was high, too, and blocked by Isaiah Rodgers with the Bears trailing by three with about six minutes to play. Gardner might have snapped it too soon, too, as both wing blockers seemed to be flat-footed. Before Sunday, the Bears only had two field goals under 23 yards blocked since 2000.
“That first field goal was a warning shot as far as I’m concerned,” Johnson said. “No. 2 was right off the edge. If [Rodgers] didn’t touch it, then he was darn close to touching it then. Something we addressed on the sideline and we weren’t able to get corrected the second time. So [we’re] certainly in a race to get that right.”