Bears coach Ben Johnson’s reputation is all fireworks and flash, but he showed Sunday he can dominate with the basics, too.
There was little memorable about the Bears’ 23-12 win over the Jets at Soldier Field, but with his backup quarterback and No. 2 running back, Johnson steered the Bears to one of their most impressive offensive performances of his tenure.
Running back Kyle Monangai was the star of the show with 146 yards rushing and two touchdowns on 30 carries, and quarterback Tyson Bagent was solid enough in injured starter Caleb Williams’ absence.
Not every victory needs to be extravagant, but this one got there slowly and quietly.
The Bears put up 492 yards of total offense, the third-most under Johnson, on a whopping 89 plays. That’s the most in an NFL game this season and most by the Bears this millennium.
They picked up 34 first downs, another season high in the league, and a franchise record
And, for the first time since 2014, they didn’t punt.
All of that added up to controlling the ball for 42:45, the highest time of possession by a team this season and the Bears’ most overwhelming effort in that regard since 1997. That left the Jets with a paltry 17:15 to do anything, including just 45 seconds in the fourth quarter.
Nothing outlandish, just the classics: Wearing down a defense, throwing punch after punch in the ground game and plowing ahead a few yards at a time.
It was a black and blue bludgeoning — and beautiful.
“You just get in a flow of what you think is going to help us move the ball,” Johnson said. “I’m always hungry and hunting big plays, and sometimes they’re there, sometimes they’re not, but I didn’t feel a whole lot of negative plays today.
“I don’t know if we had the super-explosives like we would’ve wanted, but there weren’t a whole lot of third-and-longs that I had to dial up. It was just interesting how that all played out.”
Other than the three kneel-downs at the end of the game, the only plays on which the Bears lost yardage were a sack Bagent took and a two-yard loss on a rush by Monangai. They converted 7 of 15 third downs and faced just one that was longer than six yards to go.
The Bears closed out the game with an 18-play drive, including nine rushes by Monangai, that lasted more than nine minutes as they pushed to the Jets’ 12-yard line before running out the clock.
“Ton of pride,” Johnson said of the ending.
The most unconventional thing he did was on the first play of the game. After a week of playing coy about whether he would start Bagent or third-stringer Case Keenum, he sent both of them out there. Keenum was at quarterback and Bagent lined up wide right as a receiver, only for a relatively simple handoff up the middle to D’Andre Swift.
Johnson said he did it because he was annoyed Saturday by news breaking that Bagent was the starter and called it a “ceremonial first pitch” for Keenum, though Bagent said Johnson had been hinting at the idea all week.
Bagent played the rest of the way and completed 25 of 34 passes for 268 yards with an interception for an 83.9 passer rating in his first start since 2023. There’s a good chance he’ll start again when the Bears visit the Packers on Sunday and perhaps longer, given that Williams has a Grade 2 hamstring strain, which usually keeps a player out at least a month.
Regardless, recent Bears teams have buckled under far less adversity than Johnson is navigating at the moment, and they’ve long needed someone like him who can simply keep things steady through tough circumstances.
This was progress. Who cares if it was nondescript?
It doesn’t always have to be a 59-point eruption, a cinematic story like Keenum taking down the Eagles or one of Williams’ jaw-dropping late escapes. He got a businesslike win Sunday and kept the season on track at 3-1.
Johnson’s ability to adapt has revolutionized the Bears, and it’s yet another way he has set himself apart from recent predecessors Matt Nagy and Matt Eberflus. He refuses to concede anything, and while very little has gone quite according to plan this season, he and the Bears are just fine.
