A first-year coach has taken the league by storm, has the team on track for a playoff appearance and captivated the fanbase with his personality.
The Bears have been here before.
There’s a significant difference, though, between what Matt Nagy did in 2018 and what Ben Johnson is doing now. That 2018 team was better than the current Bears, but the foundation Johnson has built seems less likely to crumble.
Much of Nagy’s success came from being handed an elite defense, and he had no pivot once that began deteriorating in 2020. He couldn’t rewire quarterback Mitch Trubisky, whose 2018 season was inflated by a six-touchdown game. And the first sign he was in over his head came when the Bears held a clownish kicker derby the ensuing offseason.
Johnson doesn’t seem like the type to stumble down that path.
At no point, even when the Bears opened with two embarrassing losses, has he looked overwhelmed. It’s hard to imagine him talking in circles and landing on sentences like, “I’m not an idiot,” or, “It’s no one’s fault other than everybody’s.”
Johnson’s top tasks were getting quarterback Caleb Williams pointed the right direction and building infrastructure for how he wanted the team to function. The fact that the Bears have won along the way — they’re 9-4 heading into their game Sunday against the Browns — is a bonus.
“We wanted to establish how we go about our business, and we’ve done that,” Johnson said Wednesday. “We want to be a physical unit, a sound unit and a poised unit. I see those three elements show up on tape. You put words up in a room, that’s great, but it doesn’t bring it to life. You need the people to bring it to life.”
If that endures through the inevitable roster shuffles and coaching staff remodels, that’s what actual culture is: New players and assistants come in, but they adapt to the environment rather than expecting it to adapt to them.
In that aspect, Johnson has seemed more ready for this position than Nagy was. They were similar ages when they started, but Johnson’s experience prepared him better because he had so much authority and autonomy under Dan Campbell compared to Nagy working under Andy Reid.
As Johnson turned down jobs the last few years, he sharpened his vision of how he’d run things as a head coach. Thorough and accurate feedback was at the core of his philosophy, and even as the Bears strung together victories this season, he didn’t hold back any criticism.
“If you live in the gray, that’s where the bad stuff happens,” Johnson told the Sun-Times before the season. “The clearer we can be with the direction of how we get them to improve, the better off we’re all going to be.”
That goes for his players and assistants, as well as himself.
Tight end Cole Kmet said Johnson opens meetings at the start of the week by showing a few play calls he got wrong in the previous game to “put accountability on himself.” If he’s taking that approach to his own work, nobody else can be thin-skinned.
Johnson also had the advantage of bringing quarterbacks coach J.T. Barrett and wide receivers coach Antwaan Randle El with him, which helped maintain precision in how the passing game is coached. Nagy struggled to form that type of cohesion and, a source said, specifically had trouble with telling wide receivers one thing and having their position coach convey a different message.
Nagy was beloved in 2018, no doubt. Club Dub was as popular as “Good, better, best,” at the time. But everything about the way Johnson has been running the Bears for the past 11 months signals he has a better chance long term. While 2018 was the high point of the Nagy era, this looks like merely a precursor to where Johnson is taking the Bears.
