Ben Johnson was about a minute into an opening statement Wednesday filled with the typical musings of a first-year coach — he praised his players’ work in the weight room and bemoaned their struggles lining up in the wrong place at practice — when he did something his predecessor rarely attempted.
He tackled a subject head on.
“It’s come to my attention,” Johnson said with a wry smile, “that the quarterback’s been out in the media over the last week.”
That was an understatement. Last week, an excerpt of Seth Wickersham’s “American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback,” detailed how Williams and his father Carl decided he’d be best-suited being drafted by the Vikings in 2024. They debated whether or not to force the Bears’ hand by trashing the city, which Carl Williams described to the author as being where “quarterbacks go to die.” Williams eventually told his father he “wasn’t ready to nuke the city” and in April 2024 accepted his fate: that the Bears would draft him.
Johnson didn’t wait to be asked about it after Wednesday’s OTA practice. He didn’t deny that the tempest was real. Matt Eberflus would have done both.
“I wasn’t here last year and so I can’t speak too much in terms of what it was like before [Williams] got here and when he got here last year,” Johnson said. “But in my four months on the job he’s been outstanding to work with, and we’re focused on getting better every day.”
Any praise for Johnson must be muted by the fact that his organization decided it wasn’t important for Williams to address the story himself Wednesday. In fact, the quarterback’s not scheduled to speak publicly for two weeks, as if the Bears are hoping the story might magically disappear before then.
Still, Johnson passed his first public test of his first head coaching job — he managed to not make a disaster worse. Eberflus never learned that skill, whether it was dealing with defensive coordinator Alan Williams’ departure, receiver Chase Claypool’s foolishness or cornerback’s Tyrique Stevenson’s legendary Fail Mary gaffe.
Johnson even delivered a memorable line when asked about Carl Williams’ assertion that Chicago is where quarterbacks come to a die, a spiritual cousin of Muhsin Muhammad’s 2008 claim that the city was where receivers also meet their maker.
“I love it, I love it,” Johnson said. “I love the opportunity to come on in and change that narrative. That’s where great stories are written.”
Whether Johnson and Williams team up for anything great is yet to be seen — both have a century of inertia working against them. But it’s clear that Johnson, both on the field and off, is a drastic change from Eberflus. Wednesday, he screamed at tight end Cole Kmet for lining up in the wrong spot and stopped practice when other pre-snap mistakes proved unacceptable.
“Agitated?” Johnson said when asked about his mood during practice. “Nah, that’s pretty normal stuff.”
He also turned on the charm when trying to navigate the Williams controversy.
In both cases, he was heard.
“Just to be honest, this organization over the last 10 years or whatever, it’s been a losing culture,” safety Kevin Byard said. “We haven’t really won a lot, so you have to drastically come in and try to rearrange everything. Whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t been working.
“I think that that’s the beauty of the guys that they’ve brought in the past couple years, with [GM Ryan] Poles and trying to reshape the roster. It’s all about trying to go in and win right now, but it takes a culture. Whether it’s details, accountability and all that stuff, we’re trying to hold everybody to the highest level.”
That takes intensity — and strong communication skills.
“You want a coach that’s fired up,” linebacker Tremaine Edmunds said. “You want a coach with energy like that and you want a coach that cares about winning, and winning in a dominant fashion.”
Said defensive tackle Grady Jarrett: “This isn’t a program where you try to be guy’s friends and hopefully they’ll buy in, No. You have to get with it.”
The biggest sign things are better? Those who played for Eberflus say they don’t want to compare the two regimes publicly — but make it clear which one they prefer.
“It’s been fun,” Byard said. “I don’t really like to get into comparisons and stuff like that, but the intensity level of Ben Johnson I feel like is very evident.”
Edmunds said the same.
“Each coaching staff is different,” he said. “I think we got a good thing that’s going on right now. So I would say that.”