The last time Bears coach Ben Johnson faced the Packers, he gathered his players in the locker room after a come-from-behind playoff victory and laid his feelings bare.
“F— the Packers,” he said. “F— them. F—ing hate those guys.”
He didn’t apologize.
“This is a rivalry,” he said later. “And [for] the city of Chicago, Green Bay, it needs to be a rivalry.”
Johnson threw no F-bombs in his postgame speech Sunday after the Bears defeated the visiting Jets. (“You guys know what next week is? Enough said.”) He provided no bulletin-board material Monday, either. In fact, he seemed relieved to have finished his video call with reporters without igniting a firestorm ahead of Sunday’s game against the Packers at Lambeau Field.
But wide receiver Luther Burden knows Johnson’s true feelings.
“I feel like he wants to beat them really bad — like everybody else in the room, every Chicago fan,” Burden said. “We just want to beat them real bad and make them quit.”
Johnson circled the Packers games on his calendar his first day on the job. At his introductory news conference in January 2025, he quipped that he’d enjoyed beating coach Matt LaFleur twice a year while part of the Lions’ coaching staff. LaFleur was bewildered that Johnson, whom he doesn’t know well, would make the comment. The two have exchanged digs through the media since, resulting in an icy relationship that never was more apparent than after the Bears’ win in the wild-card round in January, when neither man broke stride for their postgame handshake.
Asked Monday why he rarely has inserted himself into the rivalry discourse, LaFleur gave an answer that could be interpreted as a passing shot at Johnson, who has.
“This game is about players,” he told Green Bay reporters. “We’ll keep it about the players. I’m not the one out there playing. That’s always been my mentality.”
Johnson and LaFleur are nonetheless the faces of the rivalry, particularly with Bears quarterback Caleb Williams and Packers star defensive end Micah Parsons out injuries.
The teams seem to be heading in opposite directions. Last Dec. 7, the Packers beat the Bears at Lambeau when Williams threw an interception in the end zone with 22 seconds to play. The Packers then lost their final five games, including two at Soldier Field — one in the regular season and one in the playoffs. Their two wins this season have come in overtime — against the Jets, whom the Bears beat by 11 points, and against the Buccaneers, who started their undrafted rookie quarterback for the first time Sunday. LaFleur, who was given an extension shortly after the loss to the Bears in January, has drawn the ire of typically supportive Packers fans who are upset about being 2-2.
Since losing in the second round of the playoffs, the Bears have opened this season 3-1 despite playing three different quarterbacks. With Johnson calling plays, they have outscored opponents by 47 points, third-best in the NFL through Sunday. Opponents have outscored the Packers by 32 points, fourth-most in the league.
The Bears have scored the ninth-most points this season. The Packers have scored the sixth-fewest. The Bears lead the NFL in yards gained. The Packers are 19th.
Before the Bears stunned them 31-27 in January to send them into the offseason, the Packers had lost just three of the previous 20 rivalry games and seven of the previous 37. Those numbers matter, as the Bears have thought they’ve turned the tide before, only for the Packers to prove them wrong the next season. Coach Matt Nagy’s Bears beat the Packers at Soldier Field to clinch the NFC North in 2018. Nagy then opened the season with a 10-3 loss to them in 2025, the first of 11 straight Bears losses to the Packers. Coach John Fox’s team stunned the Packers at Lambeau in 2015; Fox then lost the next four meetings by a combined 47 points before he was fired. Coach Marc Trestman won at Soldier Field in his first game against the Packers in 2013, then lost the next three by 67 points before he also was canned.
Last year, the Bears split the two regular-season games before winning in the playoffs. Amazingly, Johnson already has more wins against the Packers than any Bears coach since Lovie Smith. Nagy, Fox and Trestman each won once, as did interim coach Thomas Brown in the 2024 regular-season finale. Matt Eberflus went 0-5.
A win at Lambeau would be more evidence that things are changing. But a loss would feel like more of the same.
Bears chairman George McCaskey knows the stakes. At the NFL’s annual meeting in April, he said he was fine with Johnson’s feelings about the Packers, cursing and all, but knew “you’ve got to back it up” on the field.
“If we don’t beat them in the playoffs, then the narrative is still, ‘Well, you still can’t get past them,’ ” McCaskey told the Sun-Times then. “The rivalry is 100-plus years old. And, sad to say, the last 30 years, they’ve had the better of us.”
Sunday is Johnson’s first chance to back up those words he yelled in January.
“This is a big week for us,” he said. “It’s important to our organization. It’s important to theirs as well. It’ll be really good competition here on Sunday.”