Windy City Gridiron
Oh, what a difference a coach makes!
For years, we’ve seen coaches find ways to lose. Finally, the Chicago Bears have a coach who finds ways to win.
Matt Eberflus blew games that you would only see in bad sports movies.
Matt Nagy couldn’t handle adversity.
John Fox once challenged a play and won! And that win was that the Bears fumbled into the end zone, giving the ball to the opponent as a touchback.
Marc Trestman remains the only head coach in the last 95 years of football who has given up back-to-back 50-point games.
The Bears’ list of coaches since Lovie Smith is a sad and pathetic group that, most Sundays, was more of a hindrance than a benefit to the team.
That is no longer the case.
Ben Johnson is an agent of change.
It’s been about 11 months since Matt Eberflus was fired. It’s been 9 months since a broken locker room that didn’t believe in each other or the coaching staff, held their exit interviews searching for answers.
That answer was Ben Johnson.
In just a few short months, Johnson has transformed a locker room into a group of tight-knit men who believe in themselves and believe in this coaching staff. They believe they are going to win when they step out onto the field, and it’s manifesting in the win column.
Monday night was the perfect example of that.
For years, that game was a game the Bears would have found a way to lose, much like the Raiders game before that. But this isn’t the same old Bears, this is Ben Johnson’s Bears.
There’s plenty to talk about from that game. We could talk about the strong performance from Theo Benedet. We can talk about the epic game from D’Andre Swift. We can talk about the improved coverage from the secondary. We can talk about Dennis Allen’s outstanding performance as the team’s defensive coordinator.
Heck, we can talk about Jake Moody and his wild day and his game-winning kick.
We could talk about all of it and eat up inches and inches of column space, but we’ve seen great defensive coordinators, we’ve seen effective running games, we’ve seen strong play from UDFAs. We’ve seen that before, and yet, with that, it never feels like it does right now.
It doesn’t feel like it because the Bears have a head coach. They have the right head coach.
The team is far from perfect. Johnson even admitted it postgame when he addressed the team. He told the team to imagine what it would look like when they clean up the mistakes and the penalties. He knows this team has to execute a cleaner version of football; he knows what this team can be because Ben Johnson has a vision. He knows exactly how he wants this to look, and now his players do as well.
They are striving for it together.
Will they reach it this year? Probably not.
Will they reach it next year?...
