Windy City Gridiron
Fresh off their first NFC North title in seven seasons, the Chicago Bears are entering training camp with a sense of continuity. Head coach Ben Johnson enters his second year as the head man, and aside from a few minor shuffles, his coaching staff remains largely intact. Coupled with a roster that should be close to 70% of last season’s starters, this offseason has felt much calmer than in past seasons.
Despite a high level of continuity and the optimism coming off their first postseason victory in 15 seasons, there are still plenty of unanswered questions heading into the regular season. While it’s fair to say the Bears arrived a year early last year, the hunter has now become the hunted, and the league will be on notice. We’ve seen iterations of this team making the playoffs before, but it’s been two decades since they’ve had back-to-back seasons with playoff appearances.
With more pressure and higher expectations, we’ll dive into five pressing questions surrounding the Bears as they head into training camp ahead of the 2026 regular season.
If we’re talking about the start of training camp, this is likely to be the topic on everyone’s mind. For too long, fans have been subjected to a struggling offense early in camp that will show flashes of “good days” but ultimately never catch up to the defense. Then the regular season rolls around, and it’s as bad as most feared.
Last year’s struggles were a little more understandable. Still, although they finished as a Top 10 offense by season’s end, they opened the regular season looking disjointed, minor the Week 3 explosion against the Cowboys. While it’s probably unfair to expect the offense to dominate the defense in every practice completely, a more even affair, without constant penalties and with the ball hitting the ground, is what most fans will be looking for.
On paper, the offense is returning all but three starters from last season. We’ll get to some of those battles later on, but in terms of continuity, this has been the most stability the offense has seen in quite some time. Early struggles may occur, but ultimately, this offense needs to hit the ground running without the same avoidable mistakes we heard about last August. Here’s to hoping the nonchalant pre-season preparation will remain just that.
There won’t be many open competitions for starting jobs once camp opens. Still, thanks to a playoff injury to Ozzy Trapilo and a surprise retirement from Drew Dalman, two openings on the starting offensive line will be up for grabs. In an ideal world, both competitions will be wrapped up quickly, and the team will have plenty of time to get their starting five together. As we learned with last year’s left tackle competition, that perfect world rarely exists in football.
We’ll first...
