Ben Johnson’s first taste of Bears-Packers rivalry didn’t go as planned, but it showed the kind of team Chicago must become to compete
The Bears came up just short and lost a lot in the process on Sunday.
When Ben Johnson was hired by the Chicago Bears as the team’s next head coach, he took a strong approach in his introductory press conference calling out Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur by name as someone he enjoyed beating twice a year.
While it was said to fire up the fanbase in the moment, it made for a fantastic storyline going into the Week 14 matchup between the two teams and the introduction to the Bears-Packers rivalry didn’t quite go as Johnson expected after his team lost 28-21 after turning the ball away on the last drive.
“Really close at the end, but give a lot of credit to Green Bay,” Johnson told reporters after the game. “They made a couple more plays than us. Their offense was explosive, they found some big plays resulting in touchdowns on us… (We) made it a game, but fell short at the end of the day.”
With the loss, the Bears took a massive fall down the NFC standings going from the No. 1 seed to the No. 7 seed going into Week 15, showing how ridiculously close this conference is shaping out to be and how every loss can be brutally impactful.
Playoff opportunity hangs in the balance for Chicago entering the final four-week stretch
“We’ll be a playoff team once we earn enough wins to become a playoff team,” Johnson explained. “Right now, we’re a nine-win team and I don’t think nine-wins is going to get you in this year. So, we gotta do what we can to get enough wins to find a way to get in the tournament.”
While Sunday’s loss was a smack in the mouth the Bears needed, it’s not like the team was riding high off the win in Philadelphia and simply wasn’t prepared. It came down to a handful of key plays, despite the slow start on offense, and the Bears firmly put themselves in a position to win that game.
“I think our guys were confident coming into the game that we were going to be able to come away with a W in this one,” Johnson added. “And we fell short. Like I said, we just didn’t make a couple plays there when we needed to.”
Those couple of plays are the difference in competing for a Super Bowl and spending the rest of the winter on the couch and the Bears learned that harsh reality at the best time. Looking ahead, the Bears will have three home games in the final four weeks, including a rematch against the Packers in Week 16 and a rematch against the Lions in the regular season finale.
But first, the Bears will head back to Chicago and make whatever corrections are needed before facing a Cleveland Browns team that’s proving to be much better than their record suggests. Fortunately, the Bears have proven to handle business the right way coming off a loss this year.
“Our guys do a great job of taking our lumps,” Johnson said. “We’ll learn from it, we’ll make our corrections, and we’ll move on. We’ll go right back to work. We have a process that we believe in and the work that we put in throughout the week is so important to giving us a chance on game day. They know that, they believe that, and that’s really what we’ll do when we come back in.”
Chicago Bears News
Bears fall to the Packers in the most heart-breaking way possible and lose more than just a game when it comes to playoff positioning
Tough way to lose such a great game.
