Ben Johnson
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Ben Johnson and the Chicago Bears face a must-win challenge this Sunday vs. the Detroit Lions
Each year when Week 2 of the NFL season approaches, football fans are reminded of an important stat that changes by only percentage points from one year to the next… from 1990 to 2024, 283 teams have started a season with an 0-2 record, and only 34 times (11.6%) has an 0-2 team gone on to make the postseason. This is the unenviable position that the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions find themselves in ahead of Sunday’s Ben Johnson Bowl.
As if the stakes weren’t high enough already as Ben Johnson returns to the city and the stadium he called home from 2019 through 2024, now the Bears, who are hoping to return to the postseason for the first time since 2020, and the Lions, who are aiming to three-peat as NFC North champions, each enter a game that is expected to have “a playoff-like atmosphere” with a ‘must-win’ label attached to it as well.
But once the dust settles and a winner emerges with their head held high and a loser is forced to walk off the field with a goose-egg in the W column, don’t expect Ben Johnson and Lions head coach Dan Campbell to see each other as adversaries anymore. At that point, the gloves will come off and these two coaches who have come to be as close as family will act as such.
“That friendship is always going to be there,” Johnson said earlier in the week, according to Larry Mayer of ChicagoBears.com. “I view him like family, and I think he would tell you the same thing. That will never change. We have fond memories of back when I was just a young, snot-nosed computer punk as he likes to call it in Miami.”
In an interview with the Detroit News, Campbell echoed a similar sentiment.
“Ben’s my friend. He’s always going to be my friend. But nothing about that’s going to change,” Campbell said earlier this week.
The Ben Johnson-Dan Campbell Timeline
For a large chunk of their respective coaching careers, Ben Johnson and Dan Campbell were tethered together. When Johnson arrived in South Beach to serve as an offensive assistant for the Miami Dolphins, Campbell was already on board, entering his second year as the tight ends coach for the Dolphins.
For four seasons, Campbell and Johnson worked together in Miami, and when Campbell surprisingly was named the interim coach of the Dolphins in 2015 after the early October firing of then-head coach Joe Philbin, it was Johnson who stepped up and took on his role of tight ends coach.
Then the roles were reversed in Detroit. Johnson had been on the coaching staff of previous Lions head coach Matt Patricia serving as the Lions’ tight ends coach, and was retained after Campbell was named the franchise’s next head coach before the 2021 season began. Just one year later, Campbell bumped Johnson up to offensive coordinator, and the rest, as they say, was history.
Ben Johnson was credited with being the brains behind Detroit’s offensive explosion, while Dan Campbell was cast as the ‘meathead’ motivator and figurehead of a Lions team that wasn’t above “biting a kneecap” if they had to. As a result, Johnson became one of the most coveted head coaching candidates in recent memory, and as he made his decision to go to Chicago, fans were left to wonder what that meant for the Lions.
Bears and Lions Offenses Each Crash Out in Week 1
Heading into the opening week of the season, there was a general curiosity around the NFL as to how the Bears and Lions offenses would each look after the shakeups on their coaching staff. The popular belief was that if you figured Chicago would take an immediate step forward under the coaching of Ben Johnson, then it probably meant that Detroit would take a step back after losing the mastermind of their offense.
However, both Detroit and Chicago had their share of struggles in Week 1, and to make matters worse, each of those losses came at the hands of an NFC North foe. So now, as we’re fast approaching Week 2, we’ll come closer to getting some answers when the Bears and Lions line up across from each other at Ford Field.
“No one’s going to feel sorry for us. This is going to be a quick turnaround here to get going for Sunday in Detroit, our first road game,” Johnson said after Monday’s loss to Minnesota. “We gotta turn the page here quickly.”