Right before the 2020 season, I wrote an article about how Ryan Pace had mortgaged the Bears’ future foolishly, chasing a contention window that had already closed. The sentences that ended that piece: “The 2020 Bears should be a pretty good team. Fans would be wise to enjoy that, because 2021 and beyond don’t look as though they’ll be quite as much fun.”
Five years later, I wish I had been wrong, and I suppose I was wrong about 2020. That vintage went 8-8 and was not particularly good. But the four seasons since have been downright miserable. During that stretch, the Bears have:
- Finished 21-47, the 2nd worst record in the NFL.
- Finished 5-19 in the division, averaging barely more than one win in six attempts per season against their main rivals.
- Suffered through two losing streaks of at least ten games, the only such streaks in the 100+ year history of the franchise.
- Cycled through three head coaches.
- Been outscored by a cumulative 312 points.
Besides losing a lot, the offense has been a particularly brutal experience. In the last four years, that unit has:
- Averaged only 19.2 points per game, ranking an average of 24th in the NFL each year.
- Allowed 229 sacks, the most in the NFL in that span by over TEN sacks. (They’ve ranked in the bottom 7 in sacks allowed all four seasons.)
- Cycled through five offensive coordinators, the best of whom could charitably be described as adequate.
- Spawned seemingly a million film studies about how the offense lacked any sort of clear plan or cohesion.
- Made me scream at my TV in frustration roughly 25 times per game due to a stupid mistake you don’t expect a varsity high school team to make (not getting the play call in on time, running the 14th WR screen in a row, getting conservative as soon as they get into long field goal range, etc.).
Somewhere along the way, watching Bears games largely stopped being fun and started feeling like something I had to do. After years of setting my weekly fall calendar around when the Bears were playing, I’ve found myself not even caring for much of the last two seasons. I’ve still watched every play, many of them multiple times, but found myself doing other things instead of watching the game live for probably half the games.
Watching games after the fact is much more time efficient – I can get through an entire game in about an hour – but the real joy of NFL games is watching live and experiencing it collectively with other fans. The frequent time outs and breaks between plays make it the easiest sport to talk about in real time, whether that’s hanging out with friends in person, watching with strangers at a bar, talking with folks on Twitter, or hanging out in any of the Bears game chat rooms that exist on various fan sites (including DBB). That’s significantly less fun, however, when all you have to talk about are the new and creative ways the Bears found to screw up.
The Bears’ continued ineptitude has led me to a pretty strong sense of burnout, and I know I’m not the only one in the Bears blogger community who has experienced this. Jeff stepped back and handed the site off to Robert Schmitz for a while. Robert has now stopped making content completely. Aaron Leming has stepped back how much he is doing. It turns out putting a lot of time and effort into a team who consistently makes dumb decisions, provides a terrible on-field product, and spends the second half of every season playing out the string while being completely irrelevant is hard. (Editor’s Note: He’s not wrong.)
I don’t know if Ben Johnson will win a Super Bowl in Chicago. That’s a tall ask. For right now, all I want is for him to make the Bears fun to watch again.
And I have every reason to believe he can do just that. He’s already done it in Detroit. In 2021, the year before Johnson started as Detroit’s offensive coordinator, the Lions scored 19.1 points/game, despite having Jared Goff, Amon-Ra St. Brown, TJ Hockenson, Jamaal Williams, D’Andre Swift, and a solid offensive line. In 2022, Johnson took mostly the same offensive players and improved them to 26.6 points/game, the 5th highest total in the NFL. They improved upon that mark as the personnel improved in both 2023 (27.1 points/game) and 2024 (33.2 points/game). Three seasons with Johnson calling plays yielded three top five scoring offenses.
Johnson doesn’t get to bring Detroit’s ultra-talented offense with him to Chicago, but the Bears have some solid pieces in place in Caleb Williams, DJ Moore, Rome Odunze, Cole Kmet, Darnell Wright, and D’Andre Swift. More will be added this offseason, but this group drastically underachieved to the tune of 18.2 points/game last year. I can’t wait to see what Johnson can do with them in 2025.
Let’s score some points. Let’s win some games. Most importantly, let’s have some fun.
