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The Chicago Bears have plenty of optimism about the future heading into the offseason. Chicago enters the offseason with over $60 million in cap space to spend, a top-10 pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, and QB Caleb Williams already in place. The Bears also signed Ben Johnson to be their next head coach, who should seriously upgrade Chicago’s offense from a schematic perspective.
Ben Johnson was clearly always the preferred candidate for the Chicago Bears. One recent article from ESPN reveals exactly what it was that wowed Chicago during Johnson’s head coaching interviews.
“The first words out of his mouth were, ‘I want this job,'” Bears chairman George McCaskey said.
Chicago’s search committee included McCaskey, GM Ryan Poles, team president Kevin Warren and a host of other individuals. Those included director of football administration Matt Feinstein, senior player personnel director Jeff King, chief administrative officer Ted Crews, and chief human resources officer Liz Geist. Every member of the search committee graded each interview with every candidate.
It should be no surprise that Johnson received the top grade. One team source said “he was the leader in the clubhouse.”
Now that Ben Johnson is in the building, he is hard at work assembling his coaching staff.
Johnson has already installed two of his most important coordinators. He brought in offensive coordinator Declan Doyle from the Broncos, who spent two seasons as the tight ends coach under Sean Payton. Johnson also picked former Saints head coach Dennis Allen as his defensive coordinator.
Allen recently revealed the first time that Johnson asked him about possibly being his defensive coordinator.
Allen confirmed that Johnson reached out to him late in the regular season to gauge his interest in joining him as a DC wherever he landed, per Ari Meirov.
“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.”
It is interesting to see all of the connections Allen has to Johnson by way of Dan Campbell.
Next up for the Bears is sculpting the roster in Ben Johnson’s image.
The post Ben Johnson’s immediate 4-word message to Bears during HC interview appeared first on ClutchPoints.
