After an explosive playoff run, Chicago's head coach shuts down Liam Coen's noise while embracing "regression candidate" labels to fuel the Iceman's high-stakes MVP campaign.
The Chicago Bears are getting plenty of coverage this offseason.
Why wouldn't they? The Bears are one of the hottest NFL teams on the block after that tremendous 2025 season.
Ben Johnson led an incredible turnaround that resulted in a trip to the Divisional Round of the playoffs, with the Bears coming up a couple of plays short of the NFC Championship Game.
He got the most out of Caleb Williams in his second NFL season. After all the changes that Williams went through as a rookie, whether it was his head coach being fired or having multiple offensive coordinators, he finally got consistency, and it paid off.
Williams broke the Bears' single-season record for passing yards (3,942) and had career highs in touchdowns (27) as well. Williams had a big part in the fourth-quarter comebacks that the Bears engineered throughout the season and earned the nickname "Iceman."
The Bears quarterback is now on the cover of Madden 27 and is an MVP candidate in 2026.
Not everyone is a fan of all this attention that the Bears are getting. It's not the Green Bay Packers who are complaining, but the Jacksonville Jaguars instead.
Jaguars head coach Liam Coen went on "92.5 FM," a Northeast Florida sports radio station, and mentioned how easy it is to find bulletin board material for his team, citing how much coverage Williams and the Bears were getting compared to his team.
He scrolled through NFL Network's X account and said he found 40 things about Williams and none about the Jaguars.
This persuaded a Bears reporter to ask Johnson about it at a recent training camp press conference. Johnson didn't buy into the notion that his team wasn't as motivated, pointing out that they are the top regression candidate.
"Well, we're the number one regression candidates, so I think we got plenty of motivation ourselves," Johnson said. "We about Caleb in the past. He's used to handling a lot of attention, so I'm not worried about that."
What Johnson said about the Bears being regression candidates is true. PFF recently released an article highlighting the win total projections for every NFL team.
After going 11-6 in 2025, Chicago's win total was set at 9.5.
Just because the Bears are in a bigger market than the Jaguars doesn't mean they can't find ways to motivate the team heading into Johnson's second season.
The road is going to get tougher for the Bears now that they have to play a first-place schedule after winning the NFC North.
Don't think that just because the Bears had a good year in 2025, they don't have plenty of bulletin board material as well.
Johnson and Coen will have a chance to discuss these comments when the Jaguars and Bears meet on Dec. 6.
