The setting at the end of a Chicago Bears season, when Halas Hall’s top decision makers field questions, generally has spawned even more questions — and punchlines — than it has provided clarity.
So Wednesday morning’s session with coach Ben Johnson and general manager Ryan Poles was a refreshing contrast. Coming off an 11-6 season, the franchise’s first division crown since 2018 and its first playoff victory in 15 years, Johnson opened his remarks with the same level of intensity, attitude and forward focus that defined his first 365 days on the job.
“We go back to square one,” he said. “It’s back to the bottom again and we’ve got to build this thing back up.”
Too often the Bears have been there — actually at the bottom — and talking about building it up with little evidence they understood what that process entailed. Now they’ve done it, improving by six regular-season wins in Year 1 under a new coaching staff. With quarterback Caleb Williams, the future looks bright in the rugged NFC North, the only division that had all four teams above .500.
“I’m really encouraged about the steps he took this year,” Johnson said. “I’m Caleb Williams’ No. 1 believer.”
Long gone are the days when “everything else is there” but the quarterback — and, you know, having enough wins. Johnson reiterated what he said many times late in the season, that this group of players and coaches was special, and then he made it clear he isn’t taking any sort of victory lap and doesn’t believe anything the organization accomplished in 2025 is particularly applicable to next season.
“There is no building off of this,” he said. “If you feel otherwise, you’re probably missing the big picture. We’re back at it. We’ve got to start from scratch, we’ve got to start from the fundamentals. A lot of guys talked about how difficult this training camp was. I didn’t feel like it was anything out of my ordinary. They know what the expectation is. They know what the process is that we believe in as a coaching staff.
“I think more than anything else they’re going to know what they’re getting themselves into. And yet we’ve got to dig a little bit deeper, we’ve got to work a little bit harder, we’ve got to give a little bit more if we want to take this thing over the top. We did a nice job this year, but it’s not enough. We’ve got to do more.”
If there is any carryover to the spring — the Bears can open their voluntary offseason program April 20 — it’s that returning players will understand the identity that has been shaped in terms of physicality, sound fundamentals and playing with poise, something that was highlighted in seven fourth-quarter comebacks, including the wild-card victory over the Green Bay Packers.
“They thrive in those circumstances and that showed up for us in a big way,” Johnson said. “Our coaching staff tried to apply pressure on them early on, in the springtime and throughout training camp. And I’m not saying they grew numb to it, but it’s almost like they embraced it and that they were at their best in those moments.”
Interestingly, Johnson made reference to too many dropped passes, an issue that expanded during the second half of the season and in the divisional-round loss Sunday to the Los Angeles Rams. He then talked about difficult decisions that must be made after the staff has a chance to take a step back in order to have a clear review.
Poles noted there will be more constraints. The salary-cap situation remains fluid, but the Bears don’t have what seemed like unlimited space to operate as they did in recent years. That’s where they will need to be calculated in determining how to create extra room, whom to keep and which areas need upgrades.
Left tackle looms as an area of need, with Poles saying rookie Ozzy Trapilo’s recovery from a torn patellar tendon in his left knee could carry “deep” into next season.
Poles praised defensive coordinator Dennis Allen for his ability to adjust to injuries throughout the season. Presumably the team will look to fortify that side of the ball after stockpiling the offense last March and April. Poles made it clear he’d like to bring back All-Pro free safety Kevin Byard III but called it a “challenge.”
The Bears enjoyed their most productive rookie class in years, and if that’s an example of how the front office and coaching staff can collaborate on drafting and developing, it bodes well for the future even with the team picking far from the top 10 — No. 25 — for the first time in a while.
It will be a fascinating offseason because the Bears have reached the point, after two days of exit interviews, where they already are working to build it back up. There was a sense of urgency and sharpened focus Wednesday that, quite frankly, had been difficult to discern after previous seasons, when the task ahead appeared so massive, you would walk out of the building wondering, “Where in the world are they going to start?”
“You see it across the league all the time: You panic and you want to do crazy things that everybody else wants you to do,” Poles said. “It leads you to some situations you can’t get out of. We want to stay flexible. We want to stay open-minded. We want to stay committed to building this team the right way because I think that’s the best way to sustain success. We’re always going to be opportunistic.”
Chairman George McCaskey and President/CEO Kevin Warren were seated across from the dais where Johnson and Poles spoke but were not available for comment. Sometimes they speak at end-of-season sessions like this. Their silence probably was attributable to a couple of reasons and was notable because Warren is generally eager to be in front of cameras.
- First, the Bears are paying Johnson $13 million a season to be the front man, and he’s very good in that role. He’s the best pitchman the franchise has had in a long time.
- Second, they don’t want to hijack any buzz from a successful season with ongoing discussion of the stadium situation and a brewing battle between factions in Illinois and Indiana.
- Third, the team achieved its goal of leveraging Illinois in negotiations to build in Arlington Heights by announcing northwest Indiana is an option, no matter how likely a move across the state line is. Talking about it publicly now would probably just stir things up even more in Illinois at a time when the Bears are trying to rally lawmakers back onto their side.
It was best the team prioritized football over politics, as that’s what the city has rallied around over the last five months — and really since Johnson was officially introduced one year ago today.
“Coach hit it,” Poles said. “We didn’t reach what we wanted, the goals that we wanted to hit, and that’s to be a championship-caliber team. That will never change.
“But as we’ve moved a couple days past that, I am proud of the progress that we’ve made. And knowing that, we can’t be complacent. We’ve got to keep pushing forward. We both come from organizations that have stacked success back-to-back years.”
Johnson has been so locked into the future and beginning that process that he hasn’t gone through the tape of the overtime loss to the Rams and the interception that shifted that game. But he’ll get to it.
“I’m already looking ahead to 2026 myself,” he said.