Ben Johnson’s push to add proven veterans is paying dividends in January, creating a culture built for pressure moments
The Chicago Bears are starting to show off the championship-caliber mentality going into the NFC Divisional Round.
The Chicago Bears have had a complete 180 as an organization over the last twelve months with head coach Ben Johnson in the building and he’s now leading this team into a home divisional round playoff game on Sunday night.
The Bears have become must-watch television around the league and proving to be a legit Super Bowl contender in the NFC thanks to the poise and belief from this team in late game moments.
No one expected to see this kind of turnaround in Year 1 under this new coaching staff, but it’s absolutely something the Bears expected, and planned for, going back to last offseason.
While everyone points to the flashy new rookies such as Colston Loveland, Luther Burden III, and Kyle Monangai shining in the brightest stage, the best additions the Bears made this offseason involved the veteran players that helped create the championship mentality Johnson wanted to bring back to the Chicago Bears.
Veteran leadership has played a strong role in the Bears turnaround this season
Coaches can only do so much in the NFL when it comes to establishing a strong culture and getting through to the locker room. The best coaches in the league don’t even believe in the word culture to begin with. It’s all about focusing on the details and having the right veteran leadership in the building to carry out the coaches’ message to the rest of the roster.
That veteran leadership is something Johnson needed to bring to Chicago and a big reason why this team went out to sign players such as Joe Thuney, Grady Jarrett, and Case Keenum during the offseason, and you can throw Kevin Byard into that leadership group as well.
“I keep saying it every week it feels like, but our veteran leadership, I mean, they’re phenomenal,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday. “I don’t know if I’ve been around it quite at this level before. Week in and week out, you know that they have a good pulse for the locker room and their message is going to be really what our team needs to hear.”
Look back to last week’s game against the Green Bay Packers for example. From the outside looking in, the Bears were handling things the right way going into a highly emotional game and it took all 60 minutes to come away victorious. No one batted an eye down, 21-3, at halftime and Johnson leaned on the experience of Thuney and Jarrett.
Both veteran additions were on the opposite end of the greatest comeback when the New England Patriots rallied back from 28-3 to defeat the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI. During training camp, Johnson had those two veterans explain their perspective to explain the belief that the teams can have to come back in that kind of game, and how teams can also blow a lead in that kind of game.
Having that experience played a major role forging the belief that the Bears could comeback against the Packers last week.
“Having Joe on the team helped us talk about, when you are down like that, how do you come back? What’s the mindset of the team?” Jarrett explained. “From my perspective, it’s, you have to finish people while they’re down.”
Being able to turn the page and move on
This week, the message changes. As highly emotional and thrilling as that win was on Saturday night, the Bears have to flush it down the drain. It’s a week to week business and it’s clear to see which teams can move on and which teams get caught looking in the rearview mirror.
The latter is something Keenum experienced during his playoff run with the Minnesota Vikings. Back in 2017, Keenum was the starting quarterback for the Vikings and led the team to an 11-3 record as the starter. In the first game of the playoffs, Keenum pulled off what became known as the “Minneapolis Miracle,” a walk-off 61-yard touchdown as time expired to defeat the New Orleans Saints.
The next week, the Vikings got clobbered, 38-7, by the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship Game. Keenum learned a tough lesson from that game and how that season ended. And it’s a fitting time to call back on that experience and share that lesson with his new teammates in Chicago.
“You celebrate it — you enjoy all the positivity,” Bears center Drew Dalman said. “Then, very quickly — not to diminish it or anything like that — you’re like, ‘All right, now the priority is the Rams.’ You can’t have a lull coming off a game like that or anything.”
All season long, the Bears have been building something special behind the scenes and everyone wants to call this team “The Team of Destiny,” but this isn’t luck, destiny, or divine intervention. What the Bears have been doing all year, from the coaching staff to the players, has been intentional.
“When you’ve got a group with this type of talent and you’ve got things you want to accomplish and humps you want to get over, the next thing that has to kick in is that belief,” Jarrett added.
Now, that belief is there. And the Bears are prepared to ride it all the way to the finish line, not next year or in the next three years, they plan to do it right here and right now.
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