Ben Johnson opened his postgame press conference in Seattle with an injury note. “We had Grady with a groin, and we had Street with a knee,” the Chicago Bears head coach said, referring to defensive linemen Grady Jarrett and Kentavius Street. “So we’ll see what that looks like as we move forward here on a short week.” Then he turned to a 34-17 win over the Seahawks that moved the Bears to 6-2.
Johnson said the Bears talked all week about what kind of game it would be. “A tremendous amount of respect for that opponent,” he said. “I think that’s a really good football team that we just played.” He pointed out that Seattle’s defense was number one in a lot of categories and its special teams unit is top five. “To see us go out there and play a physical brand of football, we thought that was going to be important for us,” he said.
“Hair on fire” and a patient run game
He said that showed up on the first drive, a 17-play, 80-yard touchdown march. “I thought our guys came out with their hair on fire, and I thought it carried over for 60 minutes,” Johnson said. “There were some ebbs and some flows throughout that game, and yet it felt like we responded really well as a team and rallied together. So that was exciting to see. These guys earned this victory and couldn’t be more proud of them.”
Asked what stood out about the way the game flowed, Johnson said he did not realize the Bears had run 70 plays. He said the plan against Seattle’s defense was patience. “We talked about being patient,” he said, explaining that early runs of one, two and three yards could eventually turn into bigger gains. “It’s an outstanding front. It’s a really good scheme. They make it very challenging on you. And so I thought we had some really good communication. Garrett Bradbury did a nice job driving that train for us.”
He singled out D’Andre Swift, who ran 27 times for 69 yards and three touchdowns. “Swifty ran super hard,” Johnson said. “I know he didn’t have a ton of yards, but 27 attempts and three touchdowns, every single yard was earned by him. Those were hard yards to come by.” He added that the receivers were blocking and that Caleb Williams “took care of the football, and I thought he did a lot of really good things throughout.”
“You find out more about your identity”
Johnson said a night like this tells a team something. “When the pressure’s high, we want to be at our best, and like you said, all three phases did that,” he said. “I think you find out more about your identity as a team when you get put in those situations. And you talk about it as much as you want, and yet to go through it, to live it, and to see us come out of the other side, I think it’s good for building our team, because that’s really where we’re at right now.”
He did not want to call it a statement. “We didn’t come here to make a statement,” he said. “We’re still building. We’re still building, and this is part of that process right now. And we’ve got a lot of really good pieces. Guys are owning up to their roles, and every little way they can impact this game in a positive fashion, they’re looking to do that.”
Caleb Williams and the loud stadium
A reporter asked about the game plan, and Johnson said it was one of the more elaborate ones Williams has been asked to handle. “That had a lot to do with their scheme, and we needed that out of him to make sure we were getting into a good play that had a chance,” he said. Chicago had a couple of delay-of-game penalties and a false start, and Johnson said the crowd noise had an effect. “The crowd did impact our operation, but he stayed calm, cool, collected throughout,” he said.
Asked whether he would have trusted Williams to process that much information at this time last year, Johnson said the quarterback has taken a step. “He’s definitely further along in the offense than he was. I don’t think there’s any question about that,” he said. “We’ve got a ton of confidence in him, and I know if things don’t look great necessarily early in the week, I trust him at this point to get it down by the time we get to game day. That’s a credit to his approach right now. It’s awesome.”
He shared an example from the weekend. “I looked out there, I think it was Saturday afternoon after our red zone practice, and he and a coach were still on the field for an extra hour after practice had already ended,” Johnson said. “That’s just kind of where he is right now as a player. He loves downloading all this and then bringing it to life on game day. And I think he’s played really well for these last three games.”
Jeffery Simmons and the blocked field goal
Simmons played his first game for the Bears after arriving in a trade this week, and Johnson was asked what impact he saw with less than a week of practice. “Our guys were excited the moment they heard the news that we were bringing him on, and he’s fit right in,” Johnson said. “We have a high-character locker room, and he is that himself. You can feel his presence out there, whether it’s during the play or even after the play. You can feel him talking a little smack as well, which I think elevates everybody around him.”
Johnson said Simmons got one of the game balls. “To come in there and have a share of the lead in tackles and a sack in his first game, his impact was profound,” he said. He said another defender who got a game ball, Austin Booker, who blocked a field goal, plays with the same relentlessness. “We’re knocking on the door in our field goal block unit,” Johnson said. “So it was great to see us finally knock that door down and come away with one. So he does a great job. He takes no plays off. And I think when you play like that, good things will come. They might not come often or all the time, but the more you keep chipping away with that mentality, they’re going to continue to come your way.”
What went wrong, and what is next
Seattle’s touchdown just before halftime came on a deep pass to Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and Johnson said it came on a double move that got the Bears on the outside. “We tried something similar when we got the ball back, and that’s why Rome was able to get down the sideline, and we just weren’t able to connect,” he said, referring to receiver Rome Odunze.
On the penalties, he said the pre-snap flags bother him most. “Anytime you have these pre-snap penalties, those bother me,” he said. “So the two delay games, false start, those are the things we’ve got to clean up. But it is a loud environment, but that’s no crutch for us.” On the offense overall, he said it did “a really good job throughout that game,” and that “once we got the first first down, we were able to use that momentum and end up with points. But we did have our number of three-and-outs on the day as well, which, like I said, that’s a darn good defense.”
Asked what he has learned about the team’s appetite for prime-time games, Johnson said it is too early to say much. “We’re not even halfway yet, and so I think we’re in a good spot,” he said. “There’s a lot of places that we can get better at as well, which we’ll look at in depth over the bye week. But we’re just solely focused every week. We’re just focused on how do we get one-and-oh for the next week. Once we get into December and January, we’ll start worrying about big picture stuff.” He said the short week brings “a good opponent that’s kind of hot right now,” and that the Bears have to keep finding a way “to go one-and-oh each week.”
The Bears host the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, November 8, at 8:20 p.m. ET, which is 3:20 a.m. Monday, November 9, in Cairo. Chicago’s schedule then goes straight from Week 9 to Week 11, with the bye in between.
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