Windy City Gridiron
The week we have been waiting for is finally upon us.
The Ben Johnson era has arrived in Chicago.
The Bears have a ways to go before we can say they are a Super Bowl contender, but somehow, it already feels like we’ve reached Xanadu.
Does that mean I’m about to overhype Ben Johnson?
You’re damn right.
The Chicago Bears have an actual head coach. It feels different this time. In my lifetime, the Bears have hired eight different head coaches that I can remember (I was too young to actually remember the hiring of Mike Ditka). Of those eight, I can say this is easily the most excited I’ve been for a head coach.
Admittedly, the second most excited I’ve been was for Matt Nagy, and while that certainly didn’t work out, to be fair, Nagy was the closest this franchise has come to an effective, modern-day head coach. You can argue that Nagy wasn’t that close, and he probably wasn’t, but that’s more an indictment of the other attempts the Chicago Bears have made.
Matt Eberflus was a failed hire from the start. Sure, you can say you were hopeful, but nothing about that search, from Bill Polian to the three finalists for Ryan Poles to choose from, to picking a defensive-minded head coach, made sense from the jump.
John Fox was a guy to fix the broken culture that Marc Trestman left behind. He was never going to be a long-term solution.
Marc Trestman was a foolish choice.
Dick Jauron was an ambivalent one.
There was excitement around the hiring of Dave Wannstedt, but the Bears felt so dysfunctional around that hire, from the way Mike Ditka’s firing was handled to the fact that the team had NO GENERAL MANAGER (Sorry for yelling, it still is asinine as I type it more than 30 years later).
Of course, there’s Lovie Smith. We all love Lovie Smith. But the fact that Lovie only made the playoffs in three of his nine years in Chicago, and yet he is still heads and tails better than anyone else the Bears have seen in three decades, shows the countless poor decisions the franchise has made since they dominated opponents in the mid-80s.
Lovie was a good coach, but when you compare him to his Chicago Bears head coach counterparts, he looks like Vince Lombardi.
That brings us to Ben Johnson.
I said it once, and I’ll say it again: this feels different.
Not only does it feel different because the Bears have hired an offensive-minded head coach. But they’ve also hired one who calls his own plays and is considered one of the top three or four play callers in the sport, maybe the best.
Sure, the Bears did that once before with Marc Trestman, but we saw what failed with Trestman. He wasn’t a leader. He wasn’t charismatic. He didn’t hold his players to a high standard.
Ben Johnson does.
The only fear that people seemed to have was that...
