Examining Ben Johnson’s Offense, Part 1: Down and Distance Tendencies

For the second consecutive offseason, the Chicago Bears have brought in a new offensive coaching staff, and new head coach and offensive playcaller Ben Johnson will be tasked with turning Chicago’s talent into a cohesive and effective unit. Since Johnson spent three years as the play caller in Detroit, today I want to dig into his data to see what we can learn that might translate to Chicago. I am going to focus mostly on what his play calling tendencies were and less on how effective the offense was, because effectiveness will depend significantly on personnel, which will be entirely different in Chicago.

I’ll start today by exploring what Johnson likes to do in various down and distance situations.

1st Down

We’ll begin by looking at 1st down. The table below shows how often Detroit called a passing play vs. a running play, how many of their passes went deep down the field (15+ yards past the line of scrimmage in the air), and how many of their runs were inside the tackles. A few quick notes:

• To remove game situation as much as possible, I only looked at plays between the 20s in the first three quarters. This is a look at what Johnson liked to do in fairly neutral situations. These same criteria will apply to all data in this article.
• I looked at Detroit for 2022, 2023, and 2024 so we could see what trends were consistent from year to year and what ones changed. This might give hints as to what Johnson will likely keep vs. what might shift depending on personnel.
• I also showed what Chicago looked like in 2024, so we can get a general idea of how things might change compared to what we saw last year.
• To put all these numbers in context, I provided the high, average, and low values for all 32 NFL teams in 2024, and where the 2024 Bears and Lions ranked in each category. Values in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are highlighted in red.
• All data comes from Pro Football Reference’s game play finder.

A few thoughts:

• Most of the data here matches NFL averages fairly closely. On 1st down, Johnson’s offenses consistently ran about as frequently as the typical NFL team, and took deep shots at a fairly typical rate when they did throw. Those trends were all fairly consistent as personnel changed across three seasons, suggesting they will likely stay the same in Chicago.
• The one thing that stands out here is that Johnson prefers outside runs on 1st down, as the Lions were consistently one of the most outside-heavy running teams during all three seasons he called plays.

* I dug a little deeper here and found an interesting nugget: Johnson changed the inside/outside run splits quite a bit based on the specific running back. In neutral situations (1st/2nd down, between the 20s, first 3 quarters), Jahmyr...