Chicago Bears Seek Faster Start in Year 2 Under Head Coach Ben Johnson

With Ben Johnson entering his second year as the Chicago Bears' head coach, there will be an expectation for his team to start faster this upcoming season. 

During the NFL's annual owner meetings in Phoenix, Johnson referenced that he and his staff rewatched the tape from Family Fest at Soldier Field in early August last season, a practice that featured plenty of communication issues and pre-snap penalties. 

That exercise was used as a reference point to illustrate how much further ahead the team wants to be offensively in OTAs. 

“The hope — not just for Caleb but for our entire offense — is that we start a lot further along in the spring and in training camp than where we were a year ago,” Johnson told The Athletic back in March. “I feel pretty confident that is going to be the case.”

Fast forward a few months and the Bears are already preparing for organized team activities (OTAs), which will be held from May 27-29 and then from June 2-4. 

Having already gone through some on-field workouts, offensive coordinator Press Taylor sees the benefits of a roster that is not learning the offensive system for the first time but instead focusing more on the details required to operate Johnson's scheme. 

"This time last year we were just teaching them how we wanted you to hold the ball and where we wanted you to align," Taylor said during rookie minicamp. "They didn't necessarily know we were going through play call drills with the quarterbacks. They didn't really know what the words meant to where now every tape is our guys running these concepts. It's our quarterback calling plays that he called throughout the course of last year, to where now it feels like we're more into the system and we're learning and growing and revisiting some of it.

Whereas opposed to last year, everything was new for coaches and players for most of us. I mean Ben (Assistant Head Coach/Wide Receivers Coach) Antwaan (Randle El) and (Quarterbacks Coach) J.T. (Barrett) were the only three that really had experience in the choice system. So, we were all learning. Now, I just think there's a little bit more confidence from everybody in what we're doing and what certain things mean. And you start to see again; their skill sets start to flourish a little bit more. So hopefully the goal is that we hit the ground running a little bit more, where last year we were trying to get everybody up to speed."

That faster start should have a direct effect on the entire offense, especially throughout the entire game. 

The Bears finished as the ninth-highest scoring offense in the regular season (25.9PTS/G), but there were some inconsistences with the unit. 

"In terms of when we need to be at our best in the fourth quarter, that has to stay the same," Johnson told reporters during the NFL owners meetings. "Those guys came through. They had belief and it showed up. They played really well in the fourth quarter. Now I look back—I'm talking the last eight games, playoffs included—we scored more points fourth quarter on than we did quarters one to three. That wasn't the case the first half of the season, and so we've got to figure out why we started the second half of the season so slow on offense.

That's a big mission of mine. We don't want to put ourselves behind the eight ball each and every week. That's not a formula for sustained success. We're better than that. We have too much talent on our offensive side of the ball for us to start off so slow and to dig ourselves in holes like that. We're going to find out what that is. A lot of times when you find areas to improve [and] you draw attention to it, that stuff gets corrected. Guys take a lot of pride in it."

With the players having a more established understanding of the offense and the majority of the coaching staff returning from last year, this Bears offense is positioned to take a leap forward.

Those improvement will be necessary for the Bears to navigate their 2026 schedule as Johnson enters his second year as head coach.