The Bears are down to their final two weeks to get ready for the season and they’ve hardly smoothed everything out. The Vikings will visit Sept. 8 for the opener, and there’s still plenty to settle before then.
Quarterback Caleb Williams and the offense has been up and down throughout, and the defense looked lost in the preseason finale against the Chiefs on Friday. Bears coach Ben Johnson wasn’t happy about much after that one.
The expectations are as high as ever, especially after signing Johnson to a massive contract, but the optimism at Halas Hall always seems to fizzle once the season actually starts. If Johnson wants to end that trend, he has to answer these five questions before the Vikings come to town:
Can D’Andre Swift do what they need?
The Swift question is really on two fronts. The Bears want him to be reliable and powerful running between the tackles, and it’s also likely they’re going to ask him to take on a bigger share of the offense than he’s ever done.
His history with Johnson is interesting because Johnson was with the Lions when they decided to trade Swift in 2023, and Swift was already with the Bears when they hired Johnson. Nonetheless, he’s been raving about Swift throughout the offseason, and it looks like he will be the focal point of the offense as a rusher and receiver.
“He’s hitting it hard,” Johnson said last week. “I see him turn on the gas when he sees a little crease. He’s dynamic and he is explosive. You feel that.”
There was too much lateral movement as Swift tried to turn nothing into something last season, but sharper focus on north-south running and a revamped offensive line should make a difference. And the Bears badly need that, because he’s by far their most talented running back.
Where’s the pass rush?
New Bears defensive coordinator Dennis Allen has to solve the same problem that flummoxed Matt Eberflus in trying to engineer a pass rush. The team added two new starters on the defensive line in tackle Grady Jarrett and end Dayo Odeyingbo, but so far it looks like Allen will need to be a smart blitzer.
The Bears’ best bet is defensive end Montez Sweat, their highest-paid player this season with a $25.1 million salary-cap hit. He was an instant hit when they traded for him in 2023, but he had the second-fewest sacks of his career last season at 5 1/2.
Allen has to figure out how to set Sweat up for success, and it’s unknown whether Odeyingbo will be enough of a presence on the other side to draw attention away from him. The Bears signed Odeyingbo for $48 million over three years, putting him 20th in average salary at his position, but it was a projection of where they think he’s headed. He has just 16 1/2 career sacks in four seasons, including three last season for the Colts.
How much can Williams handle?
Johnson undoubtedly has big plans for the offense this season, but those ideas won’t do any good if the Bears can’t operate on that level yet. He has to make a realistic assessment of what quarterback Caleb Williams and the starting offense can do and put that into place soon. The team likely will begin practicing specifically for the Vikings on Monday or Tuesday.
Johnson was upset about how the offense looked against the Chiefs and conceded that the playbook might need to be scaled back in the short term. He said he went into training camp “open-ended” while evaluating how much the Bears are ready to handle.
He said the volume “might have to ebb and flow” for a while, but hoped to have a grip on it by the bye week in Week 5.
“It’s placed at just the right time to identify who we are and what we’re going to be for the rest of the season,” he said.
What’s going on at cornerback?
The Bears are expecting to have top corner Jaylon Johnson back for the season opener, but there’s a lot to sort out after that. The good news for them is that corner is their deepest position.
Even with the loss of Terell Smith to a season-ending knee injury, the Bears have starting-caliber outside cornerbacks in Nahshon Wright and Tyrique Stevenson, plus a quality nickel in Josh Blackwell to back up Kyler Gordon.
Assuming Johnson is good to go for the Vikings game, by the way, he’ll finally get the assignment he’s been craving: tracking Justin Jefferson all game. With the Bears playing predominantly man-to-man coverage under Allen, they’ll have Johnson follow the opponent’s top receiver.
It looks likely Stevenson will get the second starting job on the outside over Wright, but whether he holds it is another story. Allen loves tall cornerbacks who can jam receivers at the line of scrimmage, and Wright was having a tremendous preseason before a rough night against the Chiefs on Friday.
Do they have a left tackle?
The Bears hoped one of their four candidates for starting left tackle would blow them away and leave no doubt. That didn’t happen. Instead, Braxton Jones appears to have claimed the job by default after rookie Ozzy Trapilo struggled, Kiran Amegadjie faded and Theo Benedet’s late push came up short.
Jones was a good find by the Bears in the fifth round out of Southern Utah in 2022, but he’s been a question mark his entire time with them, and they’ve weighed drafting a replacement multiple times. If Texas’ Kelvin Banks had lasted one more pick, the Bears probably would’ve taken him.
But Jones gets one more chance to prove himself, and there’s a lot on the line. He’s going into the final year of his rookie deal, and the gap in contracts for starting tackles versus backups is tens of millions of dollars.
Jones has the advantage of 40 career starts, compared to one for Amegadjie and none for Trapilo and Benedet, but experience alone won’t carry him. He has to prove he can hold off the best pass rushers in the league, otherwise it’ll undercut the improvements the Bears made in the middle of the line.