With the game on the line against the 49ers on Sunday, Bears coach Ben Johnson thought he had the play to win it. He called a multi-step trick play that required absolute precision, and with 21 seconds left and Levi’s Stadium roaring, he didn’t flinch.
The Bears ran it beautifully.
From the 49ers’ 13-yard line, quarterback Caleb Williams was on time and on target with a quick pass to tight end Colston Loveland breaking from the right side to the middle of the field, and running back D’Andre Swift weaved effortlessly to his mark to receive a pitch from Loveland with room to run.
It worked. It just didn’t work quite well enough.
The Hook and Ladder play from the end of the Bears-49ers game last night.
Ben Johnson said he was perfectly fine with the play call and when it happened. “There’s plenty of time. We’ve got plenty of good plays.”
Caleb Williams: “We’ve worked the play before … We were going… pic.twitter.com/7ZUkLawKK1
— Eli Ong (@ThePenOfEli) December 29, 2025
With the 49ers in zone coverage, cornerback Deommodore Lenoir and others met Swift at the 4-yard line, and he lunged for another two yards. The Bears had one final play as time ran out, but Williams’ pass to Jahdae Walker was short and the 49ers escaped with a 42-38 victory.
While it didn’t win the game, Johnson’s call said everything about how much the Bears have progressed in his offense.
He struggled through his own frustrations with the offense’s sloppiness in the offseason, and after one particularly ugly practice in August, Johnson warned the team, “If it continues like that, we’re not going to win many games.”
The mistakes eventually stopped, and that’s when the winning started.
The Bears stand 11-5 going into their final regular-season game Sunday against the Lions and will enter the playoffs next week as the No. 2 or 3 seed as NFC North champions. They’re third in total offense at 398.6 yards per game, and their 26.6 points per game would be their most since 2013.
“I’ve got immense amounts of trust for everybody on the offense right now,” he said Monday. “Every week, you just see them go about their business. I’m not going to call a play that I don’t fully believe in, that we can’t execute at the highest level. We’ll always — If we go down, we’re going to go down swinging like that.”
The 49ers game was as close to a high-stakes playoff environment the Bears will get until the real thing, and there was a lot to like about the offense.
Williams played arguably his best game, continuing a trend from the previous two weeks as he appears to be turning a corner at the optimal moment. He completed 25 of 42 passes for 330 yards with two touchdowns for a 100.3 passer rating.
With wide receivers Rome Odunze and Olamide Zaccheaus out and DJ Moore laboring through illness, rookies Loveland and Luther Burden stepped up. Way up. Burden led the Bears with eight catches for 138 yards and a touchdown, and Loveland caught six passes for 94 yards and a touchdown.
Swift ran for six yards per carry and scored twice, and power back Kyle Monangai gave the Bears 4.8 per carry.
When everything is clicking that reliably, Johnson has plenty of options.
As the Bears headed into a preseason game against the Bills in August, he zoomed out and reminded himself, and everyone else, that it was unrealistic for his team to be operating his full playbook at that stage. He said it could take multiple seasons to get there, and maybe it will, but it seems like it’s open from cover to cover.
“We’ve taken the training wheels off,” Johnson said. “These guys are doing a phenomenal job coming into the building each week and taking a plan and bringing it to life.”
Others are taking notice, too.
Lions coach Dan Campbell, Johnson’s former boss, basically threw out his team’s 52-21 stomping of the Bears in Week 2 as he looked ahead to the rematch. The Bears committed penalties all over the field, the score was out of control by halftime and Williams watched the end of it from the bench.
“They’re more polished and a better team,” Campbell said. “Ben’s done a good job. The system is in. These little [mistakes] that were there in Game 1, Game 2, they’ve begun to go away. They found a run game. Caleb’s playing really well. O-line’s playing really well.
“They’re playing at a high level. Much more polished.”
The only criticism of Johnson’s offense has come from himself. Virtually every week he has brought up a regret in how he called plays, and he had a couple notes from the 49ers game.
He should have gotten the play call in faster on the final snap, he said, and Williams said he didn’t have time to correct some misalignment as the play clock dwindled. That led to an immediate swarm in the backfield.
Johnson also second-guessed calling three consecutive passes from first-and-goal at the 10 earlier in the fourth quarter. The Bears didn’t get anywhere with those and settled for a field goal to take a 38-35 lead that didn’t hold up.
It’s not perfect yet, but even that reality is encouraging in a way. This early in their process, the Bears’ offense already is firing better than it has in more than a decade.
