FOX Sports Digital
Ben Johnson and Caleb Williams established many routines in their first season together. One of Johnson’s favorites was their post-practice meeting. All season long, they’d finish their work on the field and, once Williams got out of pads and into street clothes, the Chicago Bears' rookie coach and second-year quarterback would log anywhere from 60 and 90 minutes together in Johnson’s office. Much has been made of how Williams once called his early-season relationship with his coach "fragile." But in those post-practice meetings, they seem to have built something solid. And when I asked Johnson about the moments with Williams that were most fun last season, the coach pointed to those one-on-one sessions, where he would lay out the nuances of opposing defenses in relation to the Bears' game plan. "It's just this complete clarity of how we want to attack that opponent this week," Johnson told me in March at the NFL Annual League Meeting in Phoenix. "I think the coolest thing was seeing [Williams'] growth from early in the season." It’s not rare for an NFL head coach to spend time with his starting quarterback every day of the season. But it is rare to see a coach have as much of an impact on his quarterback as Johnson seemed to have on Williams in 2025. After all, at this time last year, there were concerns that the previous Bears regime left the QB in a state of developmental regression. Chicago won just five games in 2024 and fired its head coach in midseason for the first time in franchise history. Williams took 68 sacks, tied for the third-most all time. It was a tough rookie year for the No. 1 overall pick, who'd been touted as a generational prospect. But these coach-QB meetings helped catalyze the Bears’ breakout success in 2025. Williams engineered six fourth-quarter comebacks to lead all NFL quarterbacks last season, earning the nicknames "Iceman" and "Cardiac Caleb" — and just recently, the cover of "Madden NFL 27." The Bears went 11-6 and made the playoffs for the first time since 2020. As Johnson tells it, those meetings had a cascading effect on the relationship between coach and QB. Everything improved: communication, repetition, execution. "We'd meet the night before the game to go over his favorite calls, and to see how that went from early in the season to what it looked like at the end of the season, [it was] much more fluid," Johnson told me. "We just saw the game so much more through the same lens as the year went on. I think all those quarterbacks saw that and witnessed that firsthand. So I think that was the coolest thing, just to see where it started to where it finished." At the end of Chicago's season, which concluded in an overtime loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round, Johnson said he wanted Williams to get away from football for a little while. But just before he let Williams go,...
