Ben Johnson made the Bears a serious team. Now the real work starts as they try to go from good to great.
This season was a huge step forward for the Bears.
Also, this will never again be considered good enough.
Of all the ways coach Ben Johnson changed Halas Hall, raising the Bears’ standard for success has been the most impactful. While the team made a big jump from 5-12 last season to 11-6, an NFC North title and a spot in the divisional round of the playoffs, Johnson took the job a year ago eying much more than that.
Normally, that type of season would warrant a parade for the Bears, and while Johnson and general manager Ryan Poles did take a well-earned victory lap at their season-ending news conference Wednesday, the emphasis was on what they’ll do next.
“We have to dig a little bit deeper,” Johnson said. “We have to work a little bit harder. We have to give a little bit more if we want to take this thing over the top.
“It's no different than if you're trying to lose weight. If you're trying to lose 50 pounds, the first 30 is the easiest. The last 20, that's the hard part. So we did a nice job this year, but it's not enough. We have to do more.”
That’s the way serious teams are run. They don’t settle for merely making the playoffs. In fact, they fire coaches and general managers if they make it only this far too many times in a row. The real work just started.
A crucial part of that is setting aside how great this turnaround felt and making a clear-eyed assessment of the roster.
Their defense played its best game Sunday in the loss to the Rams, but ranked 29th in the regular season. The offense had four games, including Sunday, in which it failed to score 20 points. Four players started at left tackle. The Bears dropped the fifth-most passes (29) during the regular season.
The Bears had a lower point differential (plus-26) than multiple teams that missed the playoffs. They went 2-4 in the North and narrowly avoided going 0-6. They rallied from a deficit in the final two minutes to win seven times, which showed grit, but also that they weren’t miles ahead of some unimpressive opponents that pushed them to the brink.
They were good, Poles reiterated his goal has always been to build “a championship-caliber team,” not a one-year, feel-good story.
“I am proud of the progress that we've made, [but] we can't be complacent,” he said. “We have to keep pushing forward. [Johnson and I] both come from organizations that have stacked success back-to-back years, and we know the challenge.
“We're all excited for that challenge: building this team back up, making the tweaks, continuing to tighten the screws on the process and the people that we need to ... exceed [this season] and win championships around here.”
He added that while he liked the resolve his players showed, “I’d rather not be the Cardiac Bears.”
He and Johnson want dominance. That’s what the Chiefs, Eagles, Rams and Buccaneers showed in their recent championship seasons. They didn’t sneak. They bulldozed.
That’s the standard for the Bears going forward, especially now that Poles is going into Year 5 of rebuilding from the rubble predecessor Ryan Pace left him.
Poles thinks about Pace more than he lets on, and in a 2024 Sun-Times interview he described the Bears’ approach before his arrival as choosing to “kick the can down the road and build off of a house of cards.” Pace thought the Bears — albeit without a quarterback — were on the cusp of a championship chase and went all-in in a way that eventually scrambled their salary cap and decimated their draft capital. And cost him his job.
That type of outcome was in his mind Wednesday when he was asked how to upgrade the Bears from good to great.
“You see it across the league all the time: You panic and you do crazy things that everybody else wants you to do and it leads to some situations that you can't get out of,” Poles said. “We want to stay flexible. We want to stay open-minded. We want to stay committed to building this team the right way, because that's the best way to sustain success.”
That signals he’s less likely to take a big swing, on someone like Raiders All-Pro pass rusher Maxx Crosby, for example, and more inclined to take multiple medium swings. He’ll have to be right on those, because while sustaining success would be wonderful, the first step is having it in the first place.