Not a Sunshine & Hallmark Movie Guy

Bears' Johnson Telling Like It Is, Especially When He Sees 'Bad Football'

By Clete Campbell Windy City End Zone

The life of an NFL head coach isn’t built on sunshine and rainbows.

It’s built on sometimes 12-18 hour days, sometimes sleeping on your office sofa to get a head start on tomorrow’s work, and blunt, unsentimental assessment. And sometimes it looks as gruff and unkept as Bill Belichick at 7 a.m.

It’s no Hallmark movie.

You have to be brutally honest with players as much as you personally may be rooting for some with football hearts of gold. Unprepared nice guys, as Matt Eberflus will testify, usually finish at the bottom of the NFC North standings.

So when new Bears coach Ben Johnson was evaluating his full Bears unit live and in the practice flesh for the first time at this week’s Team Minicamp he called it like he saw it.

“I’ve probably seen more bad football than I’ve seen good football over my time in this league,” Johnson told reporters, also referencing his time as an NFL assistant. “It’s just trying not to make the same mistakes as the people I’ve been around maybe in the past, that I’ve perceived as mistakes.

“I don’t think you can let things slide. I think offensive football is about precision. And so, you just, it’s a constant communication of what that should look like. When they hit the mark, we love them up. When we fall short, we gotta let [them] know so we get it better next time.”

The key word, as Heavy sports deftly notes, is precision. The word perfectly describes everything that was missing in the Bears program during the Eberflus regime.

From offensive execution, defensive third down performance in the win-or-lose fourth quarter, to Eberflus’ unsteady, unconfident game strategizing that sometimes seemed straight out of a “Naked Gun” movie (Lt. Frank Drebin defused hostage situations better than Eberflus directed a fourth-quarter game plan), the Bears have had little to zero precision in their on-field performance and coach-player communication over the last three years.

"We're going to be consistent in our communication, structure, and consistency,” Johnson told reporters when he was introduced as the Bears’ new HC in January. “That will never waver."

And Johnson knows sugarcoating the obvious is detrimental to the Bears’ win column health. So he will tear into franchise quarterback Caleb Williams for bad mechanics, decision making and play execution when he has to.

"He was late,” Johnson said of Williams’ performance in a recent 7-on-7 drill. “He needs to get there faster.”

“The stuff they’ve been working on is really how you carry yourself as a franchise quarterback,” Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated said on the Friday, May 30, edition of The Bill Simmons Podcast. “They watched tape of him taking sacks and how long it took for him to come off the ground. … But if you’re lying on the ground for an extended period of time, you’re not picking yourself up off the ground, that’s gonna resonate with the rest of the team. … You need to be popping up off the ground after hits.”

And with Ben Johnson offenses, you need to be on the constant lookout for trick plays. This guy runs more tricks than David Copperfield does in his average show. Thursday’s practice was a fun sneak preview of the trickeration to come. Right tackle Darnell Wright’s one-handed catch was a thing of beauty that William “The Refrigerator” Perry is applauding somewhere.

In a Ben Johnson offense, anyone who reports eligible with a trusted arm and hands is a maybe quarterback or receiver.

“Yeah, I let those guys know, we only do this once a year, and it’s an evaluation and we’ll circle back in training camp and in the season to see who we can trust to catch the ball or throw the ball,” Johnson said Thursday. “I think there’s a couple guys on the (offensive) line that stood out. And then Case Keenum might have made the catch of the day, you know, behind the back about 50 yards down the field. So I think we’ve got some toys to work with.”

Johnson’s four Bears breakout players this week were all players who needed to make statements for their depth chart or roster status cases: defensive end Dominique Robinson, rookie linebacker Ruben Hyppolite II, tight end Joel Wilson and rookie running back Kyle Monangai.

Knowing Ben Johnson is not a sugar-coater, that’s high praise.

"We're going to push. We're going to challenge,” Johnson said. “And along with those high standards, there's also going to be a high level of support as well."

For the message he gave his team this week at it strives to emerge from the ashes of a 5-12 lost 2024 season was simple.

“Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”

Bears coach Ben Johnson is showing his new team he won't sugarcoat bad play, especially from his quarterback.

Why? Because NFL football isn’t a Hallmark movie. Some days, it’s as raw as Bill Belichick without his morning coffee.