Learning about the levels of Ben Johnson’s offense will get the wheels turning in your brain.
A Friday without the Bears on the practice field is a good opportunity to get caught up on some reading material in the bookmarks file. If you’re going to read one Bears thing, make it Benjamin Solak’s deep dive on Ben Johnson’s offense over at ESPN. It’s a terrific piece with incredible insight into the first year of Johnson’s offense, how it evolved, and why it’s primed to run like a smoothly running machine for years to come.
I’m not going to summarize the story, but I’m going to share a part of it that I found incredibly interesting, because it’s a look under the hood and into the mind of Johnson and his staff that anyone outside of Halas Hall rarely gets a peek inside.
When Johnson arrived in Chicago, he didn’t ease his young offense into his system. He dumped the entire playbook in front of them on day one, and told them to figure it out. He wasn’t building the playbook piece by piece; rather, he was giving the offense the whole curriculum and seeing how they handled it. Much of the first iteration of his offense in Chicago revolved around the run game. Makes sense. Second-year quarterback trying to find his footing. Young receiving core. A mostly new offensive line, and a veteran running back he had worked with before, D’Andre Swift.
How “Weird Stuff” Lifted Ben Johnson’s Offense In 2025
Through the first four weeks of the season, the rushing attack was a mess. I remember questioning whether Swift would be the guy at that point. The pre-snap penalties piled up; the language wasn’t landing. Johnson refused to pare his offense down, but he recognized the need to meet his guys where they were at and make some adjustments on the fly.
Instead of dumbing down the offense, they condensed it. 10-word play calls turned into single, load-bearing keywords that would tell the receivers where to line up, the line what the protection was, and the quarterback what the read was.
In today’s college football offenses, most teams run one-word calls frequently. So, Johnson and his staff took their offense in its entirety and made it more digestible and, in turn, actionable.
“If we want to make this 10-word play call into one word, we’ve still got to have something that’s going to get the receivers the idea of where to line up, the line’s going to understand the protection, the backs understand the action, the quarterbacks understand the read. It’s on us to give as many mind taps as possible,” Bears OC Press Taylor told Solak. “We came up with some pretty weird stuff.”
Aug 15, 2026; Chicago, Illinois, USA; Bears coach Ben Johnson and Browns coach Todd Monken shake hands after a preseason game at Soldier Field. Mandatory Credit: Patrick Gorski-Imagn ImagesAs Solak put it in his story, the compressed playcalls weren’t training wheels, but rather better teaching. That led to a better understanding of assignments in the run game and, eventually, a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t for Johnson and his staff.
What worked was running the ball to the right, with right guard Jonah Jackson and right tackle Darnell Wright being the biggest factor. From Week 5 onward, 66 percent of Chicago’s run plays went to the right side behind Jackson and Wright.
From Weeks 6-18, Chicago’s percentage of rushes was 65.7 to 34.3 in favor of the right side, and when they ran that direction, their success rate was 52.1 percent, and their EPA per carry was 0.12. Their explosive rush rate was 13.0 percent, compared with 44.6 percent, -0.06, and 9.8 percent in the same statistical categories.
All that considered, it’s no surprise Chicago made Wright the highest-paid right tackle in football earlier this month. He’s a keystone of their offense, and from everything we’ve heard from camp thus far, he’s only getting even better.
So is Johnson’s offense as the rest of the guys evolve with it. Each detail matters, and Johnson and his staff are masters of making the details make sense. That’s why we should be excited about what this offense can do in 2026.
Ben Johnson’s Bears Offense Is Ready to Attack the Regression Monster
There’s been a lot of talk about regression and whether the Bears’ offense will show any in 2026. Here’s where I land: we’re going to see the opposite, even more so after reading the Solak piece than I did before.
Regression narratives (and Johnson’s heard them loud and clear) assume the offense overperformed its process, or that it caught some breaks or rode some variance, and the mean is coming to collect. But that’s not what happened in Chicago last year. What happened was a coaching staff took a complex system that was flooding their players for the first month of the season, and out-taught the problem.
They didn’t get lucky. They got the receivers lined up properly, with the center identifying the Mike; they turned wordy play calls into compressed versions without sacrificing details; and they fed a right tackle until the entire run game bent to his direction, and then paid him like the weapon he’d become. Those are all coaching wins. Not luck.
Jul 31, 2026; Lake Forest, IL, USA; Bears head coach Ben Johnson talks to quarterback Caleb Williams during Training Camp at Halas Hall. Mandatory Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn ImagesAnd here’s the thing about the details that were taught last season: they don’t regress. A group that spent an entire season speaking Johnson’s language will only get stronger. The splits that used to blow up a practice are automatic now. The motions are muscle memory, and the offense is running it faster and cleaner than they were a year ago.
The success they had didn’t come from variance; it came from the details, and now, with another year of fluency, this offense not only isn’t a regression candidate, but it’s also scary for their opponents.
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