I gave myself a haircut this afternoon, then I shaved and showered. I wanted to look and feel good, because today was a big day. I wasn't going on a job interview or attending a friend's wedding. In fact, I didn't plan on seeing much of anybody at all. My big plans were to plant myself on the couch and watch my Chicago Bears play the first meaningful game of the Ben Johnson era, a Monday Night Football tilt against the Minnesota Vikings. Hell yeah I was ready for some football.
I'd been anticipating this day since Johnson was hired in late January to replace the milquetoast Matt Eberflus. I watched his press conferences and videos from training camp. I followed every offseason move the Bears made to strengthen the offensive line and improve the pass-catching talent around Caleb Williams. To say that I was bought in on the Ben Johnson experience was an understatement. If this Bears season was a movie, then I was camped out in line to preorder tickets the moment the director was announced. Now, the day was finally here.
Anyone that stayed awake through the final whistle knows that, to put it lightly, things did not go according to plan for the Bears. The Vikings were practically begging to be blown off the field, but after an opening drive touchdown in which Caleb Williams never let a pass touch the ground, there was not much to be excited about other than a Nahshon Wright pick-six in the third quarter.
My eight-year-old daughter is a big fan of Taylor Swift, and when she first got into her music a couple of years ago, I got her a bunch of Swiftie friendship bracelets. Yes, I know that you're supposed to make them yourself, but bear with me, I'm trying here. Each one had the name of one of Taylor's albums on it, except for her self-titled debut album. That one just said "Debut." Shortly after getting them in the mail, I asked my daughter which one she wanted to wear first. "I like the Debut one," she said, only she didn't pronounce it like it was a word borrowed from the French, like day-byoo. She pronounced it like any first-grader would: D-BUTT.
I found it very funny when she said that, but I found it less funny when thinking about Ben Johnson's first game as Bears head coach. This wasn't a debut, this was a D-BUTT. There's plenty of blame to go around, but here are four Bears who stood out the most, for all the wrong reasons.
Caleb Williams hasn't made the instant offseason progress that Bears fans hoped for
I'll admit, after that first drive I was excitedly texting my cousin, a fellow Bears fan, to say, "It's happening." Caleb Williams wasn't exactly making every throw on schedule, but he looked poised and in control, and when he scrambled, it was with a purpose. When he rolled out and hit Rome Odunze for a big third-down conversion down the right sideline, I may have levitated off the couch a bit. Maybe that's why my dog started barking. When he (Caleb, not my dog) took off for his first career rushing touchdown shortly thereafter, you could have told me the Bears were going to go undefeated and not only would I have believed you, I would have excitedly replied, "I know."
Caleb wasn't the same player after that drive. He sailed a bunch of throws, and had a few others tipped or batted down. Some big plays were there, but for the most part, he didn't pull the trigger on them. Until just a couple seconds before the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter, he was only able to lead the offense to three more points. That final touchdown was too little, too late.
Caleb made some big-time throws, including a couple with pressure right in his face. Overall, he seemed smarter than last year when it came to getting the ball out and avoiding a sack, even though there were a few close calls. He was only sacked twice in the game — once when he faced an immediate and unavoidable rush from up the middle, and once when he carelessly stepped out of bounds instead of throwing the ball away. That still counts as progress after being taken down 68 times last year.
The Bears were 2-2 on third down on that first drive, and just 1-11 after. Penalties and a lack of a running game constantly put the team in third-and-long, but Caleb has to be better than he showed.
The Bears' special teams were abysmal from top to bottom
I learned tonight that a group of bears is called either a sleuth or a sloth. That's not quite up there with a murder of crows or a conspiracy of lemurs, but both are still pretty good. I know the title of this article implies that there are four individuals to blame for this loss, but since the problems ran much deeper than that, I need to add a few sloths of Bears instead of singling everyone out. I'm going with sloth since as one of the seven deadly sins, it's closer to what we all watched. Sleuth seems inappropriate since you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to understand what went wrong at Soldier Field.
Not only was the Bears' special teams bad in this game, I would go so far as to say that it was one of the single worst units that we saw in all of Week 1. Very, very little went right other than Cairo Santos' missed field goal (get it?), and it cost the Bears all night. Look at it this way — the Vikings only put together 254 total yards of offense. They didn't force a turnover, and they gave up a pick-six. And yet still they won the game.
Cairo Santos is no longer an NFL kicker. I'm sorry to hurt his feelings, because he seems like a good guy, but for my baseball fans out there, this is like putting Luis Arraez in the home run derby. It seems that every team, not only in the pros but in college too, has a guy that can boot a 60-yard field goal with ease. The Vikings' Will Reichard blasted home a 59-yarder just before halftime. When I watch Santos line up a 50-yarder, I think to myself, "That's a long one" and expect him to miss. That's how we all felt in 1998 when 50-yard kicks were tough. Santos is a slap hitter in the age of the long ball. We don't have to live this way anymore.
Santos' lack of leg strength also cost him on the game's final kickoff, but he wasn't the main culprit at fault there, so I'll save that for later. He made a 42-yarder by the skin of his teeth late in the first half, but his missed 50-yarder that would have put the Bears up 14 in the fourth completely changed the momentum and let the Vikings back in it.
We also have to talk about Tory Taylor, the punter who was deemed can't-miss enough by Ryan Poles that he used a fourth-round pick on him in last year's draft. Taylor averaged 44.3 yards on six punts on the night, worse than his counterpart Ryan Wright's 47.6, but most egregious was that he seemed to have no hang time on his kicks, so his net average was a grotesque 33 yards. He also had one blocked, and after it took a friendly roll, it ended up 25 yards from the line of scrimmage, not all that different than the other times he kicked it.
Incidentally, many people might want to see the defense up here in the stockades as well for allowing 21 fourth-quarter points, but when you give up only six through the first three quarters, there should be an expectation that you've done enough to win the game. The D wa undermanned as it was with Jaylon Johnson, Kyler Gordon and TJ Edwards out, and they were understandably gassed by the fourth quarter since the Bears couldn't convert a third down and wasted so many chances to put the game out of reach.
The offensive line got pushed around in the run game
Caleb certainly didn't play his best, but a quarterback's best friend is a good running game, and the Bears didn't give him one. D'Andre Swift missed a few holes early on, but by and large, the revamped line that Pro Football Focus ranked the fourth-best in the league this summer didn't create many running lanes for him.
Caleb salvaged the overall rushing numbers with 58 yards on six scrambles, but when he turned and handed it off, Swift and DJ Moore averaged just 3.05 yards per carry. That's enough to put any offense in third-and-long, but the line compounded those mistakes by committing penalties throughout the night. The Bears were called for four false starts and had 12 penalties enforced for 127 yards.
In fairness to the Bears, the refs completely invented a drive-killing holding call on Darnell Wright and another equally crushing pass interference call on Tyrique Stevenson. Still, we can't take the blame off the team just because the refs made a few mistakes. The Bears earned this loss all on their own, and the O-line deserves their share of the blame.
Ben Johnson's decision-making left much to be desired
Ben Johnson may be the offensive-minded prince who was promised before it's all said and done. He may be the leader of men and culture changer that he seemed to be in training camp. He's still going to have to make better decisions now that the buck stops with him.
A head coach bears responsibility when his team plays as undisciplined as the Bears did, and Johnson is going to have to nip this penalty problem in the bud quickly. There were two decisions he made that stood out just as badly as the nonstop torrent of flags, though.
First was his decision to challenge a play that obviously was not going to be overturned. TJ Hockenson caught a two-yard pass midway through the third quarter that Noah Sewell punched out, and Johnson challenged that it should have been called a fumble. The only problem was that Hockenson was clearly kneeling on the ground when Sewell knocked the ball out, which made him down by contact. The Vikings did end up going three-and-out there, but I imagine head coach Kevin O'Connell saw that play unfold and thought that the new whiz kid may not be all he was cracked up to be.
The second bad decision by Johnson occurred right after the Bears finally scored to make it a three-point deficit with 2:02 to go. Chicago had one timeout left (they had lost one from that bad challenge earlier), but because they scored before the two-minute warning, they ostensibly had two, though they couldn't afford to let those two seconds tick away on the kickoff. That meant Johnson had two real options at his disposal — attempt on onside kick, or kick the ball out of bounds so that the two-minute warning wasn't wasted and the Bears would have a shot to get it back with around one minute and no timeouts remaining.
Instead, Johnson chose option number three — ask feeble-legged Cairo Santos to kick the ball out of the back of the end zone. For most NFL kickers, this wouldn't be a big ask, but as we went over before, leg power is not Santos' specialty. His kick went a few yards deep in the end zone, and in the final verdict on which coach was better prepared, Vikings kickoff returner Ty Chandler caught the ball in the end zone, looked at O'Connell on the sideline, then ran it out as his coach waved him on, wasting those precious few seconds and essentially ending the game.
Johnson didn't have to make these kinds of decisions when he was the Lions' offensive coordinator, and like most first-time head coaches, he struggled with his new responsibilities. He'll get better at knowing the right move to make and when, but this game taught all Bears fans a lesson not to expect the moon right away, or at the very least, maybe to hold off on getting that haircut.