Bears chairman George McCaskey fine with Ben Johnson ripping Packers — but knows 'you gotta back it up'
PHOENIX — Yes, Bears chairman George McCaskey was fine with coach Ben Johnson ripping the Packers.
No, he wasn’t scandalized by Johnson cursing.
“Ben and I have talked,” he said with a smile Wednesday. “We’re on the same page.”
That’s the exact same phrasing, with the first name swapped out, that Johnson used when asked what his boss thought of his cursing in the locker room speech he gave his team after their NFC Wild Card win. In a video posted by the Bears, Johnson said “F— the Packers. F— them. F—ing hate those guys.”
McCaskey, who still hands out business cards to Packers fans trying to sell them on crossing over to the blue-and-orange side, is all for Johnson leaning into the rivalry. Especially when the Bears win.
“It’s been great,” he told the Sun-Times, sitting in an armchair at the Arizona Biltmore the morning after the NFL annual meeting ended. “But you gotta back it up. That was the key. If we don’t beat them in the playoffs, then the narrative is still, ‘Well, you still can’t get past them.’ … The rivalry is 100 plus years old. And, sad to say, the last 30 years they’ve had the better of us.”
McCaskey pushed back against the idea that he’s opposed to cursing — one was amplified when the Bears chose to produce a G-rated version of “Hard Knocks” rather than one with dirty words and one without.
“Ben Johnson is not the first coach in the NFL to drop an F bomb immediately after an emotional game,” he said, “and he’s not going to be the last.”
Given his role in the founding of the league, George Halas — McCaskey’s grandfather and namesake — might have actually been the first in the NFL. And he, McCaskey said, was a Navy man who enjoyed coarse language.
The chairman is generally opposed to cameras filming the raw emotion of a locker room seconds after the game ends, but knows it’s content both national networks and his own social media team wants. He found one benefit to it: the emergence of Johnson’s “Good, Better, Best” cheer. McCaskey said he was touched by parents, coaches and even teachers leading kids in the cheer during the season.
“I don’t see how you can take that positive,” he said, “and turn around and say, “Well, I’m offended by what was said right before that.’”
In his first public comments since before the Bears’ season began, McCaskey argued that, it some ways, the Bears’ season, filled with harried finishes, was more fun than even their Super Bowl-winning year.
“In ’85, we were rolling over people,” he said. “This past season we were living on the edge, man. Every game.”
There were times during the season when McCaskey wondered whether his mother Virginia was intervening. She died last year at 102.
“Part of it is a testament to the hard work and preparation of the coaches and players,” he said. “At some point you gotta think that somebody was looking out for us.”
Before her death, Virginia McCaskey gave her heirs access to studies about family businesses — many of them fail in the third and fourth generations. At the NFL’s annual meeting last year, McCaskey talked about the importance of his family sticking together in the wake of her death.
A year in, McCaskey described the effort as a “collective task” that’s gone well.
“She wanted us to do everything we could to foresee obstacles and challenges and avoid them,” he said. “But you have to have the commitment that the family is still committed to the business. We certainly have that.”