I’m not so sure that it’s a stretch to say that Sunday was the worst offensive game the Chicago Bears have had under head coach Ben Johnson and there’s certainly a lot that went into this result.

Back in Week 2, the offense looked flat against the Minnesota Vikings. But, you could brush it off knowing that the weather was awful in that game and the Bears were going up against the best defensive mind in football.

What we just saw in Lambeau was a lot more concerning. The Bears were out-matched from the opening drive and never got the opportunity to fight their way back like they did in all three games against the Packers last season. The Packers smacked the Bears in the mouth early in this game, and never stopped swinging.

It’s a tough look after all the talk Ben Johnson had about Matt LaFleur and the Packers, and now he’s got plenty to sit back and reflect on from this one.

What really went wrong for the Bears on offense?

It’s tough to fully answer this right after the game without watching it back again, but lack of rhythm is certainly a factor. After having 34 first downs last week, the Bears only managed 17 on Sunday and had some back-breaking turnovers.

The Bears also had nine drives with five or fewer plays. That’s very uncharacteristic from the kind of offense Ben Johnson wants to operate with. He wants long drives, control the clock, and move the sticks. Chicago did none of that on Sunday.

“It’s one of those things when you can’t get in a rhythm offensively, like today, I gotta look at myself first,” Johnson said. “Just, what do we have in? Did we prepare the right way? Certainly what the play-calls were in real time also. They had a nice plan. Jonathan Gannon’s been doing this for a long time and I thought he did a great job today keeping us off balance. We simply didn’t execute at the level that we expected to.”

Going into the game, Johnson recognized that the Packers had some players defensively to watch out for. Those players had this offense in a stranglehold for essentially the entire game and the Bears couldn’t hit any clean shots to loosen that grip.

“It’s a fast group and the safeties are all over the place,” Johnson added. “The nickel is a really good player, the linebacker you could see he’s doing a great job communicating and making changes. They made adjustments in real time at the line of scrimmage. It’s a challenging unit and they made things very difficult on us. At the same time, we just didn’t execute the plan the way that we’re capable of doing. I know that as well.”

Was the quarterback play entirely at fault?

Again, I don’t think this is as black-and-white of an answer despite how people felt during the game. Tyson Bagent started the game for the Bears and ran the offense for the second week in a row. Last week, Bagent didn’t look very confident and it seemed like the Bears wanted to give him some confidence to rip the ball this week.

He had plenty of opportunities to do that, but still showed major concerns. He had plenty of high passes and didn’t rip any of the big plays. Johnson noted that the team’s horizontal attack we saw was no different than how he wanted to attack this defense, but they certainly could have attacked more vertically.

The last straw for Bagent came in the third quarter when he was intercepted for the second time of the game. Bagent is now 0-3 on the road in his career as a starter with three touchdowns and nine interceptions. After that second interception, the Bears finally made the decision to turn back to Case Keenum at quarterback.

“We felt like we just wanted a little spark there,” Johnson said. “Tyson just, could never feel like he got in a rhythm here today. We’ll look at why that was the case. The second interception happened and we just felt like ‘Let’s give Case a chance out there and see if we get different results.’”

The results were much of the same. The Keenum-led offense was in a pass-heavy situation and couldn’t stretch the ball down the field. Green Bay’s grip got even tighter and the unit forced three more turnovers to ice the game.

Lack of run game was a major issue and the Bears abandoned it too early

One game after the Bears ran the ball 54 times, Chicago only had 20 carries that were not scrambles from the quarterback position. D’Andre Swift had some decent touches early in the game but the quick deficit forced the Bears to abandon the run game, perhaps too early than they should have.

“Once again, I put that on myself,” Johnson explained. “I have to look at what I was calling and why it couldn’t get going to the extent that we wanted it to. Hard to say at this moment. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have better answers on that.”

It’s worth noting that the Bears were without Kyle Monangai, who dominated on the ground last week. Even still, Swift had some good plays on Sunday yet only finished with nine carries. This seemed like an ideal game to get him involved heavily and yet it seemed like Roschon Johnson was constantly on the field and couldn’t get any positive yardage.

The run game is the backbone of this offense. Even when you’re down, you have to keep trying to find a way to get something on the ground. If you don’t have it, and don’t have Caleb Williams’ ability to stretch the defense, you have nothing.

That was the reality on Sunday and not something that should happen with Ben Johnson calling this unit.