ClutchPoints
After the Chicago Bears hired Ben Johnson to be their next head coach after firing Matt Eberflus, it didn’t take long for the rest of the coaching staff to fill out. Johnson started by grabbing a few familiar names from the Detroit Lions coaching staff — including receiver coach Antwaan Randle El. However, Johnson made his coaching splash by hiring former New Orleans Saints head coach Dennis Allen to be the Bears’ defensive coordinator. And while their history together wasn’t household knowledge, Allen explained how this process came to be in his introductory press conference with the Bears, per Ari Meirov on X.
“New #Bears DC Dennis Allen said Ben Johnson reached out to him late in the season to gauge his interest in joining him as DC wherever he landed—and Allen told him he was on board,” Meirov wrote.
And in the clip Meirov shared on X, Allen gave a bit of a rundown on how the two knew each other and how the process unraveled so quickly.
“Yeah, I think at some point as we got later in the season, he reached out to me just to see if I would be interested,” Allen said. “I told him that I would be interested. I think it’s probably a product of just the same connections: [Dan Campbell], [Aaron Glenn], all of us were at [Texas A&M] together at some point in time or had that connection. We were all on the staff in New Orleans together. I was with Terrell Williams, he was with me in Oakland, and so I just feel like I had connections to Ben, although I didn’t really know him.”
New #Bears DC Dennis Allen said Ben Johnson reached out to him late in the season to gauge his interest in joining him as DC wherever he landed—and Allen told him he was on board. pic.twitter.com/Sl7S7Y2CNp
— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) January 30, 2025
Now, Allen’s time as the Saints’ head coach wasn’t fruitful, but his abilities as a defensive coordinator cannot be denied.
In the seven seasons that Allen was the Saints’ defensive coordinator, his defenses ranked as such in points allowed, per Alex Shapiro of CHSN on X:
So, while he might not have been cut from head coach material, he clearly knows his way around running a defense.
And with head coaching potentially something Allen might not want to return to, building stability with the Bears’ defense under Johnson could be a great partnership for the Bears moving forward.
The post Bears’ Dennis Allen reveals when Ben Johnson first asked him about being his DC appeared first on ClutchPoints.
