The premier play-calling matchup in the NFL — Ben Johnson vs. Brian Flores — is entering his fourth season.
There are enough data points, then, for Johnson to think about — and overthink — all this week. The Bears coach wonders what Flores thinks Johnson thinks Flores is thinking about.
“I’m on that path right now,” Johnson said with a smirk Wednesday.
Three days after scoring a whopping 59 points against the Panthers, Johnson has moved his focus onto the NFL’s most dangerous defensive coordinator. What happened in Week 1, he said, doesn’t matter when the Bears take the field for their home opener Sunday against the Vikings.
“We haven’t put up any points this week,” he said.
Johnson has won his chess matches against the Vikings’ blitz-crazy defensive coordinator, both in his days as the Lions’ offensive coordinator and last season as the Bears head coach. Johnson is 5-1 lifetime against the Vikings as the play-caller, averaging a whopping 27½ points. To get there, Johnson spent countless days — and nights — trying to predict what Flores will throw at him on Sundays.
In Sunday’s dizzying comeback win against the Packers, Flores blitzed a whopping 72% of the time. Last season, the Vikings led the NFL by blitzing on 44% of their downs. It’s a safe bet that Flores will blitz the Bears like mad, too — except for that one time he didn’t. In Week 1 last year, he was content to sit back and make Caleb Williams try to pick the Vikings apart, blitzing just 32% of the snaps. In their second matchup last year, the Vikings blitzed two-thirds of the time.
The Bears lost the Week 1 matchup and won in Week 11.
“You’d like to think he’s put everything he could possibly do on tape until you play him next, and you realize he hasn’t yet,” Johnson said. “So it’ll be something new. There always is with him, and that’s what makes him such a good coordinator. It’s a great challenge. It really is. You have a lot of fun on game day. Now the week of preparation is not so much fun, but you know, there’s a lot of back and forth that goes into it.”
Flores blitzes from so many places — from over the center to the cornerback and everywhere in between — that Johnson will spend his week trying to give quarterback Caleb Williams all the answers to Sunday’s test.
“When you go against a guy like this, you’ve got everything,” Johnson said. “So, that’s where it’s a lot. For our players, they have to really dedicate themselves over the course of the week to have success.”
Johnson needs to make sure he’s ready to pivot, too. In previous games against Flores, he said, he’s had to keep his head in the NFL-issued iPad on the sideline more than he would have liked.
“If he gets us on something, that’s fine,” he said. “Then we, we got to, you know, come together and make sure we get it corrected and we’ll move on from there.”
Flores is doing the exact same thing, but in reverse, this week. Tuesday, he detailed how Johnson’s offense can resemble any number of schemes, depending on his mood — from ground-and-pound to run-and-shoot, four receiver sets to run-pass options. He has no more an idea of what to expect from Johnson than the Bears coach does from him.
“So what are we getting week to week? It’s hard to know,” said Flores, who interviewed for the Bears head coaching job that went to Johnson. “And so a lot of the game is adjustments …We’re going to have our own game plan to start things off. It’s the same thing on his end — What are they doing? And how are we going to counteract what they’re doing?
“It’s certainly a chess match.”