LAKE FOREST, Ill. — Before a June minicamp session, with the sun baking the Chicago Bears’ practice field, wide receiver Kalif Raymond approached tight end Colston Loveland about staying late to catch extra passes. But there was a problem — Loveland had already caught 100 extra balls before practice.
Welcome to Year 2 of Ben Johnson.
The practice field routinely featured players who stayed 30 to 40 minutes longer to fine-tune their craft. Quarterbacks and receivers worked on their chemistry while defensive backs — a unit that helped the Bears lead the NFL with 23 interceptions last year — worked overtime with the JUGS machine.
The intensity wasn’t different from last year, Johnson’s first as a head coach. But this year, the players didn’t have to rely on trust that Johnson knew what he was doing. There was a proof of concept after Johnson transformed a five-win team into an 11-win NFC North champion that lost in the divisional round to the Los Angeles Rams by an overtime field goal. Johnson established himself, but success established expectations.
“I don’t think there’s any way you can cut corners and expect to win on Sundays,” Johnson mentioned. “Training camp’s a big part of that.
“Our guys understand that. They know what they’re walking into. I think our type of guys, they embrace it, they want it.”
Caleb Williams set the Bears’ record for passing yards in his first season with Ben Johnson, and expectations will be for more growth in Year 2. Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn ImagesThe Bears open training camp on July 25 when rookies report, and those young players are likely to get a harsh scouting report on what to expect.”He worked the s— out of us,” defensive end Montez Sweat mentioned. “We just was all on one accord. Everybody was on the same page, and everything was really about winning.
“If it wasn’t about winning, then it was nonexistent.”
And Johnson didn’t play favorites. Quarterback Caleb Williams felt the wrath of his new coach last year. Plays would be repeated over and over until done correctly. Even the prized quarterback would find himself tossed out of drills.
Williams recently told an assistant coach: “I feel like I was drowning, trying to breathe or stay alive and wait for a boat to come around last year.”
The life raft came in the form of development. Williams set the franchise’s single-season passing record with 3,942 yards while leading the Bears to their first playoff win in 15 years.
It’s why Sweat offered up a one-word synopsis when asked to describe what brought the team success last season: “Ben.”
THE SIGN IN the Bears’ team meeting room at Halas Hall hammers home a core tenet: Physicality. And the message is not confined to certain position groups.
“I don’t care if you’re a lineman, which is [who] you normally think of [being] physical, but also our receivers and our DBs, between the blocking and the tackling, [being physical has] got to show up in terms of how they do things fundamentally,” Johnson mentioned.
He was not just providing lip service. A day after a sloppy practice during Family Fest at Soldier Field in August, Johnson conducted one of the most physical training camp practices in years. As temperatures soared into the upper 90s, the Bears went through their 12th and final install of camp with two hours of live tackling and intense short-yardage situations.
Four separate skirmishes broke out as tempers flared.
“I think any team takes on the personality of its head coach,” team chairman George McCaskey mentioned, “and what you saw last year was a group of guys that fight like hell for each other, that never give up, that never considered themselves out of it, that by all appearances have ultimate faith in their head coach that he’s going to give them some way to pull it out.”
That’s exactly what general manager Ryan Poles was looking for when he pursued Johnson, who was the Bears’ top candidate in the 2025 coaching cycle after helping build the Detroit Lions’ offense into one of the league’s best.
“It’s probably my biggest weakness, I trust early,” Poles mentioned. “We went through a process to hire, and once you hit all [checkpoints], and once you’re in the boat with me, you get everything. You can have the keys to my car, my house, garage code, you can sign in my iPhone if you want, you can watch my kids, I watch your kids. I’m all in.
Ben Johnson earned the trust of his players and front office with a successful first season, and that belief in his vision has been evident during the offseason. Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images”So he hit all of those boxes. So I started at a high level of trust and worked backwards, and it’s remained extremely high and I believe it’ll stay up there.”The Bears are finally at a point where Poles believes he could step into the background as the team’s front-facing presence and allow Johnson and the players the opportunity to run with what had been built.”It made me proud, because there has to be trust to do that,” Poles mentioned. “It’s almost like it’s your baby and you’ve got to hand it over, but when you hand it over to the right person, you have a ton of confidence and you’re at peace.”I would say that’s probably the best word. This is the most at peace that I’ve been.”IT’S BEEN 41 years since the Bears won the franchise’s only Super Bowl title with one of the most dominant defenses in NFL history. No other Bears team has been able to compare, even the 2006 team that lost in Super Bowl XLI to Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts. But to McCaskey, the 2025 Bears team that featured an NFL-record seven fourth-quarter comebacks holds its own place in franchise lore.
“In ’85 we were rolling over people,” McCaskey mentioned. “It was just an absolutely dominant team, and [last] year it was living on the edge, strengthening business for cardiologists all over Chicagoland, this miraculous, improbable, unbelievable season, just when you think it can’t get more improbable, it does.”
What can Johnson do for an encore? The Bears face the league’s toughest schedule, and Las Vegas isn’t convinced they can repeat. The Lions are the betting favorite to win the NFC North, followed by the Green Bay Packers and then the Bears.
Additionally, as ESPN’s Ben Solak noted last week, Chicago’s defense was first in expected points added on takeaways and 30th in EPA on all other plays. But takeaways often regress from year to year, and they might not lead the league in that category again, especially after losing Kevin Byard III, Nahshon Wright, Tremaine Edmunds and C.J. Gardner-Johnson, who were Chicago’s top four in interceptions last year, accounting for 18.
The challenge is clear, which is why Johnson has emphasized that last year’s success is nothing but a memory.
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“It’s difficult to do as a fan, I want to keep reliving 2025,” McCaskey mentioned. “I’ve had a lot of fans come up to me and say that’s the most fun they’ve ever had as a Bears fan, but he’s right. We need to put it behind us. We need to move ahead.
“Anything that we did in 2025 is not going to help us in 2026, and we got to be ready, especially because we’ve had some measure of success, a lot of people are going to be coming after us.”
One of the reasons the target is firmly on the backs of the Bears is Johnson’s personality. When he got the job, he took a shot at Matt LaFleur, saying he enjoyed beating the Packers coach twice a year. Then after a miraculous comeback win over the Packers in the wild-card round, Johnson went a step further and shouted “F— the Packers!”
That energy infects his players, including Williams, whose late-game heroics were inspired by his coach’s confidence.
“Oftentimes, it feels like we’re looking into a mirror,” Williams mentioned last month on the “4th&1 with Cam Newton” podcast. “Because when those moments come up, I know he has all faith in me, and he knows I got all faith in him.
“We’ll be talking, and he’s like ‘I want to whoop their ass by 50,′ and you can see it.”
The swagger, the “good, better, best” chants after wins, the trash talk all conspire to mold Johnson into the type of coach who epitomizes a city and fanbase that sense something special might be happening.
It’s why McCaskey describes Johnson in the simplest — and most reverential — way: “He’s the face of the franchise.”
