Bears’ Ben Johnson lights fire under offense (again) after failure to run ‘one of our simpler’ game plans

It’s been awhile since Bears coach Ben Johnson went off on his offense, but he let it fly after a 19-16 loss to the Lions on Sunday to end the regular season.

They matched their season low in scoring from late October, hit a new one in yardage at 270 and were down 16-0 going into the fourth quarter. And sloppiness was one of the main reasons their late rally fell short, specifically an intentional-grounding penalty by quarterback Caleb Williams with 2:02 left that put the Bears in a third-and-20.

“We can’t dig ourselves in a hole like that,” Johnson said. “I was disappointed with the offense as a whole. I let those guys know that. And we’ll be better for it. We’ll address it. We’ll get those things cleaned up and we’ll be better for it.”

 He was especially frustrated by the offensive struggles because the Bears used one of their “simpler” game plans of the season. When asked if his game plan was simplified to avoid showing too much ahead of the upcoming playoff game against the Packers, Johnson said no.

 As he has before, Johnson not only ripped into the poor performance, but warned the Bears that playing this way will cost them going forward. He said he was “not pleased with the offense at all,” and the Bears won’t get away with that in the playoffs.

“The stakes are a lot higher here going forward,” Johnson said. “We can’t afford to have one of our three phases play like we did [Sunday], so we’re going to have to pick it up. I get fired up just thinking about [making corrections] right now.”

Johnson criticized the offense throughout the offseason, most notably in an early August practice and after their preseason finale against the Chiefs.

 He was exasperated by pre-snap errors in training camp and said Aug. 3 the offense was “sloppier than we were hoping we would be at this point,” and warned, “If it continues like that, we’re not going to win many games.”

 
Three weeks later he openly contemplated scaling back his playbook going into the season because of “really sloppy football” by the first-team offense in a preseason game against the Chiefs.

He fumed again in September about the team’s overall imprecision after the 0-2 start and said the Bears were outworked by the Lions in a 52-21 loss and their “practice habits are yet to reflect a championship-caliber team.”

The Bears thought they were past all that after rallying to 11-4, winning the division and Williams and the offense thriving the last three games. They certainly took a step backward Sunday.