Around the league, Ben Johnson has NFL execs believing in the Bears

Last season, the Chicago Bears showed they could be quite good. This season, there are ample reasons to believe that they may be truly great.

A franchise that has traditionally let their passionate fans down and found ways to self-sabotage and kill their own momentum has employed a true slump-buster in head coach Ben Johnson. This team is getting respected and feared by opponents around the league in ways that it hasn’t since the heyday of Mike Ditka smoking big cigars, Sweetness carrying the ball to paydirt and Buddy Ryan running the 46 Defense.

This group hasn’t proven anything along the lines of that last great era of Bears football, mind you. But there is every reason to believe that last year’s playoff run was no fluke. I believe that this team — unlike so many young upstarts that tend to quickly regress when they taste some success — will have the proper mentality and discipline and desire to continue pushing to contend with the very best teams in the NFL.

Ben Johnson is the Bears' biggest competitive advantage

It all starts with Johnson, who burst onto the scene as a rookie head coach after establishing himself as one of the NFL's brightest young offensive coordinators in Detroit. Johnson has a rare feel for preparing a football team and making adjustments, attacking an opponent’s weaknesses and willing a team to believe in itself.

“He’s already one of the five or six best coaches in the league,” one longtime NFL personnel executive (who was part of coaching staffing for decades) told me. “He’s that good.”

“Johnson is the difference-maker there," another general manager said. "The family hasn’t changed (ownership). It's the coach.”

Longtime NFL general manager Marty Hurney urged me to start paying attention to Johnson very early in his career in Detroit, when he was taking on more responsibility and meeting with the media every week. Hurney told me to check out his press conferences and look at the Lions second-half offense and track the multiplicity in the run game and the ruthlessness with which he called a football game.

“I think this one has a chance to be really special,” he told me at a time, well before Johnson was interviewing for head coaching gigs or on the way to being such a hot candidate that he could turn down owners and wait for the right opportunity to emerge.

And sure enough, in his first season as a head coach, Johnson became the face of the Bears franchise and a strong weekly voice. His team found ways to overcome adversity and win games in the second half. Individual players — because player development matters so much and especially at the skill positions — got markedly better as the season wore on, and it was clear that he has tailored his system to the talent.

None of that feels particularly fluky.

The Bears offense quietly became elite

From Week 9 on last season, everything about this offense turned up. We knew there would be a robust learning curve. Johnson mandates his offenses move with speed and tempo and alter their cadence, and that takes time to hone to eliminate nagging procedural penalties.

He took Caleb Williams, an uber-talented but raw quarterback, out of the shotgun, where he was almost exclusively in college and more than 75 percent of the time as a rookie, and put him under center almost more than any other quarterback in the NFL (at a rate approaching old-school, immobile, drop-back passers like the Rams Matthew Stafford). Those are seismic shifts in fundamental elements like the exchange and footwork, and once they took hold around late October, it was liftoff.

Why this feels sustainable and not a one-year spike

Nothing is guaranteed in this league from year-to-year, which is a large part of what makes it so compelling. But this is no ordinary coach and this is no ordinary offense and I anticipate a significant carry over of the concepts that fueled last year’s ascent and necessary recalibrations along the way.

The defense doesn’t have to be great, and while it likely will not produce takeaways quite at last year’s rate, anything close to a league-average defense in key metrics will more than set this team up for success.

Johnson has this locker room primed for divisional games — studying under Lions coach Dan Campbell who brought that franchise back from the dead had to help in that regard — and Campbell is now on his third OC in an effort to replace Johnson as his offensive play caller.

Caleb Williams has a chance to enter the MVP conversation in a way similar to Drake Maye one year ago. The offensive line should be better, and this will be one of the most balanced attacks in football.

So we say, believe in the Bears. They are for real.

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